Attributed to Sir Peter Paul Rubens

Charles Fairfax Murray;
sale, London, Christie's, June 1951, as Van Dyck (both references unverified, from pencil inscriptions on old mount);
Victor Koch, London

J. Müller Hofstede, 'Some Early Drawings by Rubens', Master Drawings, II, 1964, pp. 5-7, pl. 2 (as Rubens);
Idem, 'Beiträge zum zeichnerischen Werk von Rubens', Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, XXVII, 1965, p. 275 (as Rubens);
M. Jaffé, 'Rubens and Raphael' in Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art presented to Anthony Blunt on his 60th birthday, London/New York, 1967, p. 102 (as 'the young' Van Dyck);
J. Wood, 'Rubens or Van Dyck? "Mucius Scaevola before Lars Porsenna" and some problematic Drawings', Mercury, No. 10, 1989, p. 32, fig. 7 (as Attributed to Rubens);
Idem, 'Rubens and Raphael: The Designs for the Tapestries in the Sistine Chapel' in Munuscula Amicorum. Contributions on Rubens and his Colleagues in Honour of Hans Vlieghe, Turnhout 2006, I, pp. 272-273, fig. 6 (as 'anonymous Flemish artist after Raphael');
Idem, Copies and Adaptations from Renaissance and Earlier Artists. Italian Artists, I. Raphael and his School (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XXVI.2), Turnhout 2010, pp. 199, 214-215, no. 27, Copies (2) (as 'anonymous Flemish artist').

The sheet has been exposed to light which has darkened the colour of the paper to a tonality slightly darker to the one visible in the image in the catalogue. The paper is brittle and buckling particularly at the bottom where there are three to four tears including one in the right hand corner and a small loss towards lower left corner. A bigger loss to the left hand margin made up with a piece of paper on the verso. There are also some creases throughout, where the ink has bitten the paper creating some tiny thin tears. There is a tiny hole in the sheet, located upper centre. Also tiny losses of pigment where the ink has darkened. Overall the sheet has foxing and some areas of staining.
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Both before and after his first journey to Italy in 1600 Rubens was profoundly influenced by the art of that country, and made many copies, reworkings and interpretations of the works of the great Italian masters, both ancient and modern.  The recent publication of no fewer than six volumes of the Corpus Rubenianum series dedicated to Rubens' works of this type¹ is testament to the quantity, and to the complexity, of the body of material to which this seminal relationship gave rise, and this despite the fact that a central document of this relationship has been more or less entirely destroyed.  Many of the original drawn copies of compositions, figures and motifs from the works of art that Rubens saw on his travels between 1600 and 1608 were contained in a sketchbook, known as his 'Pocketbook', but this crucial document, mentioned by Bellori and owned at a certain point by Roger de Piles, was tragically burned on 30 August 1720 in a fire in the studio, within the Louvre, of the celebrated royal ébénist André-Charles Boulle. 

What exactly was contained within this Pocketbook -- which will be the subject of a further Corpus Rubenianum volume by Arnout Balis and David Jaffé -- remains somewhat unclear, although four surviving manuscripts, created by pupils or followers of Rubens, consisting largely of copies from the Pocketbook,² do allow a degree of reconstruction, and other studio drawings contribute further important information.  Yet all these copies tell us more about the contents of Rubens' Pocketbook than they do about its graphic style; the only clues in this regard would appear to be a tiny handful of sheets, copying the works of earlier masters, which can tentatively be suggested to have originated from Rubens' Pocketbook.  The most important, and relevant, of these sheets is the one in Berlin, dated by Held circa 1603, in which Rubens has copied figures from both Raphael and Holbein.³  The Berlin drawing is much more compositionally coherent than the present drawing, where all except two of the heads are copied in isolation, without any attempt at the creation of a composition of any type.  Yet all the same this sheet as a whole has a very satisfying balance -- something we see so often in Rubens' composite sheets of studies -- and the details of the handling are strikingly similar to those seen in the above mentioned drawing in Berlin, and other, similarly conceived early study sheets by Rubens, based on the works of other artists. 

The six heads seen here all appear, in reverse, in the tapestry, The Sacrifice at Lystra (fig. 1), one of the famous Vatican Tapestries woven in Brussels for Pope Leo X in 1515-16, on the basis of the great Raphael cartoons now on long-term loan from the Royal Collection to the Victoria & Albert Museum.  The present drawing may have been made either directly from the cartoon, or from one of the various prints that were made after the tapestries, which are in the same direction as the cartoon, rather the tapestry.  Rubens is known to have owned six painted copies of Raphael's compositions, but since these works are lost, their attribution is uncertain.⁴  Only five of the six heads recorded in the drawing are to be found in the cartoon in its current form; the latter omits a small strip of the composition at the extreme left edge of the tapestry, which is where the figure of the elderly bearded man, found in the top right of the present drawing, appears.  It is, however, still possible that the drawing was made from the cartoon, which must originally have included the entire composition that was ultimately woven.  Immediately after their creation, the cartoons were sent to Brussels to be used in the weaving of the tapestries, and remained there until 1618, so it is perfectly possible that Rubens could have had access to these famous works in the originals, presumably before leaving for Italy in 1600.  Among the corpus of Rubens studio drawings in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (known as the Rubens Cantoor drawings), are several fragmentary studies, presumably copied from lost Rubens originals, which also record heads from the Raphael Cartoons, including the Conversion of the Proconsul Sergius Paulus.⁵ None of the heads on the present drawing is duplicated in the Copenhagen group.

Like many of Rubens' copies after Italian prototypes and other works that relate to or derive from them (including the Chatsworth 'Antwerp Sketchbook'), the attribution of the present drawing has been much debated, and it has been variously published as the work of Rubens, Van Dyck and an anonymous artist in the Rubens circle.  Ludwig Burchard believed it was a copy of a lost Rubens original⁶, but in 1964 Justus Müller Hofstede published it as Rubens, suggesting it was made in Genoa in 1602 from the Cartoons themselves (it was not then known that the Raphaels were not sent back to Italy until after 1618).  Michael Jaffé and Hans Vlieghe, meanwhile, preferred an attribution to the young Van Dyck, and a dating between 1616 and 1621, suggesting that the artist made his drawing from the set of painted copies after the Cartoons that are described in Rubens's inventory and could have been brought back by him from Italy as early as 1608.  Jeremy Wood at one point cautiously accepted the attribution to Rubens, but in his more recent Corpus Rubenianum volumes he revised his view, describing the drawing as the work of the same anonymous Rubens follower as the fragments in Copenhagen.⁷

In our opinion, however, the present sheet is very different in style and quality from the Copenhagen studies; it seems to us to be of extremely high quality, and also consistent in details of the handling with the tiny group of autograph Rubens copies after figures from Italian Renaissance prototypes that are known to us today.

1. J. Wood, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Part XXVI (2), Copies and Adaptations from Renaissance and Later Artists. Italian Artists, 6 vols., London/Turnhout, 2010-11

2. One, the so-called De Ganay manuscript, sold, New York, Sotheby's, 25 January 2012, lot 24, with further information and bibliography. For the most recent commentary on the Pocketbook, and a summary of the most recent literature, see also D. Jaffé, 'Rubens's lost 'pocketbook': some new thoughts,' The Burlington Magazine, CLII, February 2010, pp. 94-8

3. J. Held, Rubens, Selected Drawings, Oxford 1986, pp. 66-7, no. 7, reproduced p. 165, pl. 8 (the plate wrongly captioned)

4. Wood, op. cit., 2010, p. 194

5. Ibid, pp. 199-200, 211-212, No. 26, Copies 2-5, figs 53-56; 215, No. 27, Copies 35, figs 59-61 (as Anonymous Flemish artist after Raphael). See also Rubens Cantoor, een verzameling tekeningen ontstaan in Rubens' atelier, exhib. cat., Antwerp, Rubenshuis, 1993

6. Ibid, p. 199.

7. Ibid, p. 204, note 61.  We are grateful to Jeremy Wood for reading a draft version of this entry, for providing additional literature and provenance, and for confirming that he maintains the opinion of the drawing that he published in 2010.