The past week or so has been a rewarding time for me on the cultural front with visits two days apart to the Royal Opera House for a performance – superbly conducted by Andris Nelsons – of Wagner’s Der Fliegend Holländer, with Bryn Terfel in fine voice as the cursed ship’s captain, and to the National Theatre for Tom Stoppard’s new play The Hard Problem.

Reviews of the latter have been mixed, but the doyen of the reviewers’ craft, The Guardian’s Michael Billington, gave it the thumbs-up and so do I. The play supplies a fascinating examination of the nature of consciousness while being, as is generally the case with Stoppard’s work, hugely entertaining. The production is sold out for the first stage of its run (in the NT’s smallest Dorfman Theatre). There will, however, be opportunity to see it in NT Live performances in various cinemas, including Oxford’s Phoenix Picturehouse and the Vue on April 16. This is not to be missed.

Another must-see at the moment is the Royal Academy’s new exhibition Rubens and His Legacy, under the generous sponsorship of the RA’s longstanding partner BNY Mellon. This blockbuster, which continues until April 10, comes hard on the heels of the National Gallery’s Rembrandt: The Late Works which attracted a total of 264,488 people during its 96-day run.

Curiously, perhaps, the star of the show proved to be a work that can usually be seen on home ground at the British Museum. This is the drawing of A Young Woman Sleeping (Hendrickje Stoffels) dating from about 1654. This was not only the most purchased postcard from the National Gallery shop, but also the most liked and shared image on Facebook as well as the most talked about on Twitter.

Dr Nicholas Penny, the National Gallery director, said: “The drawing has often been likened in its swift and suggestive brushwork to Chinese painting, and we discovered during the course of the exhibition that the drawing is well known in China and much copied by art students there.”

It is early days yet to say what is proving to be "the" image of Rubens and His Legacy. My guess, though, is that this is likely to be the astonishing Tiger, Lion and Leopard Hunt, which is thought to date from 1617 and has been brought to London from its home at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes. The image is used on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, a superb publication costing £28 (£48 in hardback), and in posters advertising the show.

The hungry tiger with a mouthful of the horseman’s shoulder is proving an arresting sight for passengers on the London Underground.

The assembly of animals depicted will be recognised, even by those with the scantiest knowledge of zoology, as one that would not be encountered in the natural world. Rubens, in fact, built up the picture from various sources, recycling some of his earlier work in the process. He studied animal skins to learn the physical characteristic of the big cats and, this being the case, one can only marvel at how lifelike – horrifyingly so – the whole composition is.

Writing in the catalogue, Nico Van Hout, of Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts, says: “Rubens succeeded in blending all [his] borrowings into a powerful and convincing image. The existence of the composition in numerous studio copies suggests that the artist considered it extremely successful.”

But it is with other artists’ attitude to this and other work that this exhibition is principally concerned. The artist’s legacy, as alluded to in the title, can be seen in such works as Eugene Delacroix’s Lion Hunt of 1855.

A surprise is to find Rubens’s influence extending to that most British of painters, Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873). Van Hout writes of the “profound” importance of Rubens in the development of British animal painting. This arose after Landseer saw and copied Rubens’s monumental canvas the Wolf and Fox Hunt.

Oxford Mail:
Oxford artist Jenny Saville poses next to one of her works of art as she curates La Peregrina, a response to the Royal Academy’s Rubens exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts on January 13, 2015 in London, England.

This was in the collection of the politician and financier Alexander Baring, the first Lord Ashburton, whose descendent, the 7th Lord A, plays an important part in contemporary cultural life as host’of Grange Park Opera at his Hampshire estate. How well Landseer learned from the techniques of Rubens can be seen in his picture, included in the exhibition, The Hunting of Chevy Chase.

Though one tends to think of Rubens principally as a painter of voluptuous nudes – these, after all, are what "Rubenesque" describes – his range here is shown to be surprisingly wide. His landscapes showing the flat Flemish scenery were an influence on John Constable in his depiction of his believed Suffolk scenery.

One room at Burlington House is given over to a “response” to the exhibition by Jenny Saville RA, who lives and works in Oxford.

She has produced a new work for the show called Voice of the Shuttle (Philomela) - so new, indeed, that some of the paint on it was observably still wet on the morning of the exhibition’s press show. Jenny said: “Whether you think you like Rubens or not, his influence runs through the pathways or paintings. Like Warhol, he changed the game of art.”

Other contributions to Jenny’s response come from Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. Admission to the Rubens show costs £16.50.

For information go to royalacademy.org.uk, or telephone 020 7300 8000.