School of Peter Paul Rubens

This large and finely preserved sheet belongs to a group of at least four drawings by the same hand that have been copied, with some minor variations, from Rubens' monumental painting The Fall of the Damned, in the collection of the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Two highly comparable sheets were sold at Sotheby's London in 1967, both of which similarly to the present work are distinctively numbered in pen and brown ink, 333 and 334 respectively. At the time of the 1967 sale the two aforementioned works were attributed to Jacob Jordaens, however other than his close artistic association with Rubens there is nothing from a stylistic standpoint to connect these drawings to Jordaens. The same can also be said for the present work.