The story
When Peter Paul Rubens came home to Antwerp in 1608 after eight years in Italy, he was among the most sought-after painters in Europe and he built a house to match. On a city street he added an Italian Baroque wing to a Flemish townhouse, with a carved screen and portico opening onto a formal garden, and he ran the largest painting workshop north of the Alps out of it for three decades.
The studio was a small factory. Rubens would sketch a composition, and a team of assistants, among them the young Anthony van Dyck, would work it up to his corrections before he finished the important passages himself. From these rooms came altarpieces and hunting scenes shipped to kings across the continent.
The house fell into other hands and was nearly lost before Antwerp bought and restored it in the 20th century. It is furnished now as a wealthy painter's home of the 1630s, hung with some of his own pictures and the antique sculpture he collected to draw from.
