JUSTUS MÜLLER HOFSTEDE, who died aged eighty-five on 27th April 2015, was a distinguished scholar of seventeenth-century Flemish painting, particularly the art of Peter Paul Rubens. He was born in Berlin on 9th May 1929, the son of Cornelius Müller Hofstede (1898–1974), who had a long career in museums which culminated in his appointment as Director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, a position he held from 1957 until 1964. Justus was related on his father’s side to Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, the great scholar of Dutch art. He was trained at the universities of Heidelberg, Göttingen and Freiburg and completed his dissertation on Rubens’s teacher Otto van Veen at Freiburg in 1959 under the supervision of Kurt Bauch. From 1959 until 1967 he had a stipend from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and was based at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich (with frequent trips to Italy). In the latter year he finished his Habilitation under Herbert von Einem at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn on the subject of Rubens in Italy 1600–1608. Shortly afterwards he joined the staff of the Institute of Art History at the University of Bonn and remained there for his entire career.

The art of Rubens, and particularly the art of his Italian period, was at the very centre of Justus’s academic life. His Habilitation was the basis of the two-volume catalogue of a remarkable and authoritative exhibition held at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne in 1977, Rubens in Italien, which marked the four hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth. He contributed eight essays on aspects of Rubens’s Italian years as well as the individual entries: together they constitute the definitive statement of his views on the subject. In that year there was also an exhibition covering the artist’s entire career and a symposium in Antwerp and it was there that, as a young curator at the National Gallery in London, I first met Justus and began what would become a long and close friendship. In the mid-1970s there were three great – and highly competitive – Rubens scholars, Julius Held, Michael Jaffé and Justus. They frequently disagreed and were not shy about criticising each other in print or in lectures. The dispute between Held and Jaffé about the so-called Cardiff cartoons, which was played out in the pages of this Magazine, was perhaps the best known example, but there were many other skirmishes, including Justus’s contention that the so-called Chatsworth Sketchbook, published by Jaffé as the work of the young Van Dyck, was not by the artist but by another member of Rubens’s studio and dated from the 1630s. Jaffé also had a particular interest in Rubens’s Italian stay and published his Rubens and Italy in 1977. He and Justus held different opinions about individual paintings and drawings, although both developed a broadly similar image of the young Rubens and the wide range of influence of what he saw and studied in Italy.

Justus’s teacher, Kurt Bauch, was and remained a great model to him throughout his career. He admired Bauch’s range of interests, his passion and his animated style of teaching, and he emulated them. Like Bauch, he was intrigued by the creative process and by tensions between innovation and tradition, individuality and the collaborative work of the studio. He wrote extensively about drawings and oil-sketches as well as finished paintings. The intellectual cross-currents and rich humanist traditions of seventeenth-century Antwerp fascinated him, and with his deep classical knowledge and wide reading in many languages he felt entirely at home in that world. In addition to his books and articles on Van Veen, Rubens and Van Dyck, he wrote monograph-length articles on Abraham Janssens and Jacques de Backer.

His interests and his publications were not confined to seventeenth-century Flemish art. He also wrote about sixteenth-century Flemish painting (notably a very important essay on Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the volume of papers given at the Bruegel symposium in Berlin in 1975, published in 1979), seventeenth-century Dutch painting, sixteenth-century Venetian painting, the early Renaissance in Florence (he edited a volume on this subject in 2002) and Italian Mannerism, while he also had a special interest in the study of art theory and emblem books. The former was central to a major article on the series of Allegories of the Senses by Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder in the Museo del Prado which enriched our understanding of their complex iconography and range of reference and the latter was the subject of a remarkable symposium he co-organised with H. Vekemann in Cologne, Wort und Bild in der niederlandische Kunst und Literatur des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, whose valuable papers were published in 1984. He also wrote about and taught classic Modernism.

Justus was a great teacher. He was hugely knowledgeable, not just, of course, about Flemish art but – having lived for an extended period in Italy as a student – about antique, Renaissance and Baroque art in Italy. But it was not only his wide-ranging knowledge which made him such a wonderful teacher. He was a passionate enthusiast, speaking with great feeling in front of works of art and interpreting them in an entirely approachable manner. He supervised many important doctoral theses. The term for such a supervisor in German is, of course, Doktorvater, and Justus was a real father to his doctoral students. They became part of his family with his wife, Helga, and son Daniel, and were often to be met at his beautiful house in the Bennauerstrasse in Bonn. He was patient, careful and conscientious and it is a tribute to these qualities that so many of his pupils occupy key positions in museums and universities in Germany today. I think, for example, of his successor in Bonn, Hans-Joachim Raupp, the Director of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Marcus Dekiert, and the curator of Flemish paintings at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Mirjam Neumeister.

The 1994 Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch was a Festschrift for Justus to which many of his pupils, colleagues and friends throughout Europe and America contributed. It contains a thoughtful appreciation of him by Raupp (to which this obituary is considerably indebted) and a valuable bibliography of his work from 1957 until 1994, as well as a three-page list of his fifty-seven doctoral students, evidence both of his remarkable range and his profound dedication to teaching. Justus was prominent in both University and civic affairs in Bonn, serving on the University Senate and as a Prorektor. He was also a member of committees for the preservation of the architectural integrity of the city, which was under threat from building development and traffic schemes. He was a prominent figure in the Bonner Heimat- und Geschichtsverein, the oldest civic association in the city, and it was for this work that he received the Deutsches Preis für Denkmalschutz in 1982, the Rheinland-Taler of the Landschaftsverbandes Rheinland in 1985 and in 1990 the Verdienstkreuz 1. Klasse of the Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland from Bundespräsident Richard von Weizsäcker.