I first met Paul Huvenne at the symposium that marked the 1977 Rubens Year in Antwerp, celebrating the 400th anniversary of the artist’s birth. At lunch in a restaurant overlooking the Hendrik Conscience Plein and the Jesuit Church (now St. Carolus Borromaeus) it was Paul and Arnout Balis together with whom I connected, my future brothers in art history. They inherited some of that warmth from their mentor at Ghent, Roger A. d’Hulst. Closing the circle, Paul’s funeral was held April 25, 2026, in that same church. Hundreds of people filled the place, witnessing their love, affection, and respect for Paul. Just as one testimony, Gary Schwartz recounted to me how Paul’s support had secured the future of Codart. Arnout and Paul are gone too soon.
Two years later, in 1979, Paul and I met by chance in the courtyard of Bramante’s Tempietto outside S. Pietro in Montorio on the Roman Gianicolo. Fellows at the American and Belgian Academies in Rome, we invited each other to dinner and renewed our acquaintance.
But it wasn’t until 1989 when I spent weeks conducting research in Antwerp that my bond with Paul strengthened into close friendship. Being on your own in Antwerp can be lonely. Paul and his wife Greet Vinck invited me to dinner at their house, Terlinck Straat 20, in Berchem, where they welcomed me with a warm hospitality that lasted over the years. Paul and I were simpatico and we could talk openly. When I spent a year in Antwerp with my family, 1993-1994, the friendship expanded. I was now a “huis vriend,” friend of the house. Our children Celia and Thomas, close in age, played together. For a time Celia attended the experimental “speelscholeke” in which Paul involved himself deeply. Over the years I came close as well to his daughter Hanne and son-in-law Michael and now to their children Marie and Sophie. Learning to speak Dutch won me new respect from Paul and Arnout and I wish now that I could remember some of it. Paul would go down into his cellar and bring up a spectacular bottle of wine which made his guests feel special. At the gathering after the funeral Michael poured from fine bottles of wine that came from Paul’s cellar, a sign of Paul’s joy in life. Paul also was practiced at origami with which he delighted children and grownups alike. Greet, Thomas, and Paul visited us in turn one summer on Cape Cod. I remember Paul patiently extracting every morsel of a lobster that I had boiled, taking so much delight in it. And when we dined at a restaurant in Provincetown, Paul astonished the waiter by sending back a bottle of wine which he could tell was corked.
And then there was the shared love of art history and Flemish culture. Paul asked me if I was a connoisseur. No, I answered. But he was. His discernment is evident in the magisterial catalogue that he wrote for the 1984 exhibition Pieter Pourbus meester schilder held in the Bruges Memlingmuseum. It is, however, much more than an exercise in connoisseurship. Paul reconstructed the several contexts in which Pourbus lived and worked, hence opening up the history of Bruges during the sixteenth century when that city was eclipsed by Antwerp. It is fascinating and telling of Paul’s intellectual rigor that he concluded the introductory essay about Pourbus with a section analyzing “The marginality of his style.” Paul noted that altarpiece panels painted in Bruges are smaller than those commissioned in Antwerp; an observation possible only by visiting churches and museums. Further, Pourbus stuck to his linear, grisaille-like technique while his colleagues in Antwerp forged ahead with new methods of expression in color. And the painter attracted no followers outside of his local, provincial milieu. Paul refused to exaggerate the importance of his exhibition’s hero, even as he demonstrated the varied aspects of the artist’s achievement. When I last saw him in January of this year he showed the same honest judgment in our discussion about the relative merits as painters of Michael Sweerts and Michaelina Wautier. Wautier was an innovator on whom Sweerts depended, I argued. But, said Paul, Sweerts was the better painter. This judgment of quality stands in harmony with Paul’s support, of To Each Her Own: Female Artists in Belgium and The Netherlands 1500-1950 (A chacun sa grace : femmes artistes en Belgique et aux Pays-Bas 1500-1950; Elck zijn waerom: Vrouwelijke kunstenaars in België en Nederland, 1500-1950, catalogue, 1999, exhibition 1999-2000, curated by Katlijne van der Stighelen and Mirjam Westen).
It was in his capacity as museum director, first in the Rubens House at Antwerp (1984-1997) and then in the Antwerp Royal Museum of Fine Arts (1997-2014) that Paul could make his greatest contribution by bringing together many different people in the support of art. I enjoyed with other colleagues the privilege of contributing to the catalogue for the exhibition Rubens Cantoor: een verzameling tekeningen onstaan in Rubens’ atelier, displayed at the Rubens House in 1993, published in Dutch with a facing English translation, making it accessible to a wider audience. He sparked the careers of future curators such as Katharina van Cauteren (https://phoebusfoundation.org/en/beleef/in-memoriam-dr-paul-huvenne-1949-2026/) and he ignited encounters with artists, as Jan Fabre wrote (https://www.facebook.com/angelos.janfabre/photos/paul-huvenne-to-hear-that-you-have-passed-moves-me-profoundly-you-were-never-jus/1520894899396992/). Woven in as a constant source of energy and conviction, Paul nurtured and shared his love for the art of Rubens.
Koen Bulckens, now curator at the Antwerp Royal Museum of Fine Arts, wrote his master’s thesis with Arnout Balis at the Free University in Brussels, completed his dissertation with me at Brown University, and published a volume of the Corpus Rubenianum in collaboration with Paul. So there is for me an encouraging link between that brotherhood from 1977 and the ongoing present.
Nevertheless, as the gravestone of the sculptor Artus Quellinus the Younger proclaimed in front of the great high altar that he created for the St. Jacobs Church in Antwerp: geen jonst voor de konst/ no joy for art.
Jeffrey Muller
Brown University