Today has been Rubens, Rubens, Rubens.   Our exhibition is about vastly much more than just Rubens, but is fundamentally about how to get contemporary audiences to engage with Rubens’s stature, not just in his own lifetime across Europe, but his influence on eighteenth-century artists, nineteenth-century artists, and, in the room which has been specially curated by Jenny Saville and added to the exhibition since it was shown in BOZAR in Brussels, on contemporary artists, including Picasso and Sarah Lucas.   I think the exhibition looks – but then, of course, I’m prejudiced – pretty wonderful in our big galleries (wall colours chosen by Eric Pearson), which enable the thematic system of organisation to work quite clearly:  love, sex, war and poetry;  he did them all.

I slipped into an early morning viewing of Rembrandt:The Late Works, really only to be able to commune with a small number of the greatest works before they return home:  the extraordinary Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis which is owned by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Sweden, but lent to the Nationalmuseum;  The Syndics, of course, from the Rijksmuseum;  the two portraits from the National Gallery in Washington, acquired, I note, in 1942 (there is detailed information about the provenance of these and other paintings online in order to make clear their immunity from seizure);  the astonishing Jacob blessing the Sons of Joseph from Kassel where I have never been;  and what is presumed to be his last work, Simeon with the Infant Christ in the Temple, also from Stockholm, so profound even if, or perhaps because, unfinished.   As rich an exhibition as I’ve seen in a long while.