Why were supporters of colour in the French Royal Academy called Rubenists?

Supporters of colour in the French Royal Academy were called Rubenists because they championed the art of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens as their primary model.12

Beginning in 1671, a long-standing dispute known as the "quarrel" of colour versus drawing emerged within the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. While their opponents, the Poussinists, argued that drawing and line were superior because they satisfied the mind, the Rubenists maintained that the true aim of painting was to deceive the eye and imitate nature through the manipulation of colour.13

The Rubenists viewed Rubens’s work as a supreme example of how nature, rather than the imitation of Classical art, should predominate in painting. This movement eventually gained the upper hand in the Academy, with the triumph of their aesthetic ideals coinciding with the rise of the Rococo style in the early 18th century.12