Peter Paul Rubens as a Draftsman

This essay, written by Anne-Marie Logan and Michiel C. Plomp, was derived from the exhibition catalogue Peter Paul Rubens: The Drawings (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2005).

Catalogue numbers (cat. nos.) refer to works of art in the exhibition catalogue. In this essay, links are provided for catalogue numbers that are illustrated and described in the online feature. Please use the back button on your browser to return to the essay.

Peter Paul Rubens was extremely careful with his drawings and kept them together all his life. There are even indications that he did not want other people to look at his drawings and designs.1 To a modern person this behavior may seem strange, but it really is not. For a seventeenth-century artist, drawings were indispensable in numerous ways, especially in a large studio. They were made for the creation of new paintings; collaborators used them to assist the master on these paintings; and they served as instructional material for pupils to copy. The drawings were guarded from the outside world because they were considered a kind of studio secret; the competition could well exploit designs for new compositions if they were released prematurely. How precious Rubens considered his drawings is evident from his testament, which stipulated that they should be passed on to any of his sons or sons-in-law who became a painter; only if it became clear, once all his children were grown, that none would become an artist or marry one could the drawings be dispersed.2 (Rubens did not provide for the possibility that one of his daughters might become an artist.) For all these reasons it is almost certain that Rubens would never have allowed his drawings to be shown in an exhibition like the present one. Drawings were private, strictly for the studio, strictly an element in his working process. To display his drawings publicly, so that everybody could see his searching, his sweat and toil, would probably have felt entirely inappropriate.

Since Rubens made drawings only for himself or for use in the studio, there was no reason to sign them. Whenever his name appears on a drawing, it is a later addition, most likely written by a collector. For modern connoisseurs who wish to get a proper picture of which drawings are by the master and which are not, this is, of course, a serious setback. Inscriptions, however, can be useful; their graphological evidence, combined with stylistic analysis, can establish a drawing's authenticity. The inscriptions on Rubens's drawings are usually personal remarks about what impressed him in the subject he has just recorded, or they are records of necessary information he might otherwise forget. For example, in the costume study Robin, The Dwarf of the Earl of Arundel (fig. 9), Rubens added notes on color, interspersed with brief descriptions of the garment. In some of his landscape studies Rubens not only jotted down observations on color, as in the close-up nature study Study of Blackthorn with Bramble and Other Plants (fig. 20), but also made note of optical phenomena, as in the late study Trees Reflected in Water at Sunset in London (cat. no. 104). Most of these inscriptions are written in Rubens's native tongue, Flemish. On occasion he used Latin. Italian was used for inscriptions meant to be read by others, such as the humanist Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc with whom Rubens was collaborating on a book project (cat. no. 24), or the stucco worker who was to execute a relief according to Rubens's design (cat. no. 52).

Given their private character, there was no need for Rubens to date his drawings, either. If we want to get an idea when certain drawings were made, we have to resort to circumstantial evidence, such as letters, contracts, dated paintings, or dated prints. It is, for example, thanks to a number of letters of 1620 between Rubens, the agent of Wolfgang Wilhelm, Duke of Neuburg, Count Palatine (1576–1653), and the duke himself that we can connect Rubens's drawing of the Birth of the Virgin, now in the Hart Collection (cat. no. 52), to a relief in the duke's church in Neuburg and deduce when the drawing was made.3 An association with paintings—the majority of Rubens's drawings are preparatory for paintings—is often helpful in finding the date for a drawing. Fortunately, many contracts or payment records for Rubens's more important commissions have survived and offer us a useful framework. Rubens signed the contract for the Raising of the Cross altarpiece now in Antwerp Cathedral in June 1610 and completed the painting within a year. This means that the individual figure studies for this work (cat. nos. 37, 38, and 39) likely date from the second half of 1610. The character of a drawing related to a painting is critical, however, for while Rubens usually worked on a detailed study of a specific figure while his painting was in progress, he sometimes made a drawing of an exploratory nature before the contract was signed. Drawings related to printmaking, a distinct category within Rubens's drawn oeuvre, can generally be dated without much of a problem. Title-page designs tend to date from shortly before the time the related books were published, and the same is true of preliminary drawings for dated engravings or etchings.

The absence of a signature and a date at times makes it difficult to form a proper idea of Rubens's drawn oeuvre or of his development as an artist. Moreover, Rubens used drawings for many purposes, and their variation in type, technique, and style is often disconcerting and bewildering. The drawings he made in preparation for paintings, for instance, are very different from those made in preparation for prints. But even within the category "drawings for paintings," there are huge discrepancies in style and technique. Rubens's dialogue on the page with his distinguished artistic predecessors yielded not only more or less straightforward copies but also drawings to which he gave a "face-lift," that is, old master drawings that he sometimes extensively retouched. Rubens's drawings can vary so widely that one sometimes wonders whether the same artist made them. But indeed he did, and often at almost the same time.