Sir Peter Paul Rubens

Pierre-Jean Mariette (L.2097),
his sale, Paris, Basan, 15 November 1775-30 January 1776, lot 1007 ("Vénus allaitant les Amours, à la plume & à la pierre noire, de même grandeur que l'Estampe de C. Galle, sous le titre de Crescetis amores")

The discovery of this important and previously unknown drawing by Rubens not only adds a very beautiful, highly personal work to the artist's oeuvre, but also answers various long-standing questions for Rubens scholars, and contributes in a fascinating and unexpected way to our knowledge of the artist's relationship with one of the leading Antwerp patrons of the day. Thanks to the existence of an engraving by Cornelis Galle with the same composition as the present drawing (fig. 1), which credits the design to Rubens, it had long been presumed that such a painting or drawing by Rubens must once have existed.¹ On the basis of a reference in the Mariette sale catalogue of 1775 to a Rubens drawing of the same subject that had been engraved by Galle,² it had also been proposed that the lost work in question was a drawing formerly owned by the great French collector,³ but until now no such drawing was known and the identity, and even the medium, of the source for Galle's print remained unclear.

With the discovery of the present drawing, we can finally be certain that the drawing listed in the Mariette sale catalogue was indeed the design for Galle's engraving, but, even more importantly, we can go some considerable way towards explaining how this composition, in both its drawn and engraved forms, came into being, previously a puzzle for Rubens scholars, as the print is something of a one-off within the corpus of engravings after Rubens.  In most cases, the prints executed after Rubens' designs either reproduce fully-fledged paintings by the artist, or are book illustrations or title plates, engraved after design drawings specifically made for the purpose.  Galle's print of Venus nourishing the Cupids does not, however, fit neatly into this pattern, being too intimate to be after a painting, yet clearly not after a design intended for publication.

The key to this puzzle lies in the lengthy inscription on the present sheet, not reproduced in the print and therefore previously unknown, in which Rubens not only signs, dates and titles the drawing, but also writes an extensive dedication to the Antwerp senator and patron, Paulus van Halmale.  The drawing must have been made as a personal gift from the artist, perhaps for inclusion in an unrecorded album amicorum, and must only subsequently have been engraved. This theory would seem to be supported by the existence of a copy of the present drawing, indented and reddened on the reverse, which was on the art market in 1976, presented as the drawing by Cornelis Galle the Elder for the print of Crescetis Amores.⁴  If the original drawing by Rubens was bound into an album amicorum,  then it would indeed have been necessary for the engraver to make a faithful copy first, rather than transferring the Rubens drawing directly to the plate by indenting it.

Van Halmale (circa 1562-1648), was born in Bergen-op-Zoom, but was registered as a burgher of Antwerp in 1613, where he subsequently held a variety of civic posts, including magistrate, treasurer and member of the court of orphans.  He was also very actively involved with the city's artistic life: he was appointed a headman of the Guild of St. Luke in 1627, was (with Hendrik van Balen) co-guardian of the children of the late Jan Breughel the Elder, and was one of the two witnesses for the bride at the marriage between Anna Breughel and David Teniers in 1636 (the other witness was none other than Rubens).⁵ 

Van Halmale's relationship with the art and industry of printmaking seems to have been particularly close, which might explain why the present drawing, though apparently made as a personal gift from Rubens, ended up being engraved.  Although Cornelis Galle's print lacks the dedicatory text that is present on the drawing, other prints are known with dedications to Van Halmale:  Galle's father, Theodoor Galle, had dedicated a print after Rubens' Ecce Homo to him, describing him as a promoter and patron of engraving, and there are also similar dedications on Schelte à Bolswert's print after Van Dyck's Christ Crowned with Thorns, published by Martinus van den Enden, and on Lucas Vorsterman's engraving, St. Francis in Solitude, after Gerard Segers.⁶  Van Halmale's standing in the civic and artistic community of Antwerp was also recognized through the inclusion of his portrait in Van Dyck's Iconography, the highly influential compendium of portrait prints of notable princes, statesmen, scholars, artists and connoisseurs of the day, engraved by various printmakers after drawings by Van Dyck, and published by Van den Enden between 1636 and 1641. The engraved portrait of Van Halmale (fig. 3) was made by Pieter de Jode the Younger, after the original portrait drawing by Van Dyck, now at Chatsworth.⁷     

April 1616, the date that Rubens inscribed so precisely on the drawing, was not long after Van Halmale established himself in Antwerp, and it is very possible that we have recorded here the earliest beginnings of a relationship between the two men that was to last for much of the remainder of their lives. In any case, we can certainly see that Rubens was keen to flatter his dedicatee.  The title inscribed above the drawing, Crescetis Amores, is taken from a passage in Virgil's Eclogues (Book X) where a pining shepherd carved his love on a tree, so that it could grow with it: ...malle pati tenerisque meos incidere Amores arboribus: crescent illae, crescetis Amores.  This metaphorical image was also taken up by Rubens' teacher, Otto van Veen, in his Emblemata Amatoria.⁸ The classical references in this drawing are not limited to the text: the figure of Venus herself is strongly reminiscent of the antique sculpture, the Crouching Venus (fig. 2), which Rubens may well have seen in Mantua.⁹

The subject and genesis of this drawing are certainly of the greatest interest, but it is no less exceptional in terms of style and technique.  Stylistically, it combines various typical features of Rubens' drawings, in a way that is very unusual within his work, but entirely explicable given the drawing's equally unusual function.  We see here a surprisingly free and energetic composition for a drawing on such an intimate scale.  In some respects, notably the handling of the details of the faces, the pen technique is very close to that of drawings made as studies for book illustrations, in particular those for the two great Plantin Press publications of 1613 and 1614, the Missale Romanum and the Breviarum Romanum; see for example the Adoration of the Magi, in the Pierpont Morgan Library.¹⁰ One of the most striking features of the present work is, however, the very refined modelling and highlighting, largely achieved in black chalk and white heightening rather than pen and ink or wash, and this approach is not at all characteristic of Rubens' drawings made for prints.  The combination and interaction between black chalk and pen and ink and wash is also extremely distinctive and striking in the rose bush and other foliage to the right, where the lively mixture of techniques is very close indeed to that in the two splendid, if recently debated, landscape drawings in the Louvre and at Chatsworth.¹¹  

Although close comparisons can be found for all the individual details and features of this drawing, it stands apart in the way that these features are combined, as befits a very rare example in Rubens' work of a drawing that is relatively small in scale, yet was made as a finished work in its own right, rather than as a preparatory study for a print or painting.  Until now, the evidence of the print by Galle indicated that a somewhat unusually conceived composition by Rubens had previously existed, but only now, with the discovery of this drawing, is it finally possible to understand that this puzzling print was a record of an extremely beautiful drawing, made by Rubens with enormous thought and care as a personal gift for a leading figure in the artistic world of early 17^th-century Antwerp.

We are very grateful to Anne-Marie Logan and Elizabeth McGrath for their help in cataloguing this drawing.

 

1. Although it might at first have been assumed, on the basis of the scale and conception of the composition, that the work by Rubens reproduced in this print was a purpose-made drawing, rather than a painting, the fact that the legend on the print is P.P. Rubens pinxit., rather than P.P. Rubens del or inv, left the matter unclear. It cannot be proved whether the print is by Cornelis Galle the Elder or by his nephew, Cornelis the Younger, but Didier Bodart argues persuasively for the Younger; see D. Bodart, Rubens e l'Incisione, exh. cat., Rome, Villa Farnesina, 1977, p. 141, no. 301.
2. F. Basan, Catalogue raisonné des différents objets ...Cabinet de feu Mr Mariette, Paris 1775, n°1007        
3. Bodart, loc. cit.
4. With C.G. Boerner, Düsseldorf, Neue Lagerliste nr.67 (1976), no. 35, the attribution to Galle the elder endorsed by Justus Müller-Hofstede and Konrad Renge.
5. This biographical information is taken from C. Depauw and G. Luijten, Anthony van Dyck as a printmaker, exh. cat., Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moretus/Stedelijk Prentenkabinet, and Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, 1999-2000, pp. 374-5.
6. Ibid.
7. M. Jaffé, The Devonshire Collection of Northern European Drawings, Turin/London/Venice 2002, vol. I, p. 33, no. 954, illus, also with reproduction of another version of the drawing, in the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento.
8. This iconographical information kindly provided by Elizabeth McGrath.
9. P.P. Bober and R. Rubinstein, (Renaissance Artists & Antique Sculpture, London 1986, p. 63, under no. 18) state that Rubens saw and drew the sculpture now in the Royal Collection, while it was still in Italy, but no such drawing survives.  The pose does, however, recur often enough in Rubens' work – e.g. in the 1614 painting Venus frigida in Antwerp – to support their suggestion.
10. See A.-M. Logan and M. Plomp, Peter Paul Rubens, The Drawings, exh. cat., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005, pp. 169-71, no. 49
11. Martin Royalton-Kisch published these drawings as being by Van Dyck, rather than Rubens, but most other scholars maintain their traditional attribution to Rubens, not least because their grandiose conception and scale seem to reflect Rubens' approach to landscape much more than Van Dyck's.