Sir Peter Paul Rubens

Laid down. The lower left corner lost, and made up: browned (burned?) at edges of loss. Paper lightly foxed and discoloured throughout. Dark horizontal lines across centre of sheet. Ink slightly faded in parts, but overall impression nonetheless strong.
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This powerful and previously unrecorded drawing by Rubens demonstrates very clearly the artist's astonishing ability to use the contrasts between the seemingly very different media of pen, chalk and wash to great visual effect. The precise purpose for which the drawing was made is unknown, but it is a striking example of Rubens' imagination and technical mastery as a draughtsman, and an important addition to the corpus of his known drawings.  

The drawing depicts a bishop saint, holding a bible in his left hand and a crozier in his right, standing on top of two recumbent figures. Dr. Paul Taylor, of the Warburg Institute, has kindly proposed that the subject is St. Lambert, the Bishop of Maastricht, who is sometimes shown standing astride the two men who murdered him in the year 705. Lambert later became a patron saint of Liège, where the medieval cathedral (now destroyed) was dedicated to him, so it is possible that the drawing related to some project in that city, although no such commission is recorded.

Compositionally, the most similar surviving work by Rubens is the oil sketch, in a private collection, showing St. Norbert Overcoming Tanchelm, a sketch that, very fascinatingly, served as the basis not for a painting but for a sculpture, executed by Hans van Mildert.¹ But the similarity is only superficial, and the subject here cannot be the same: in representations of St. Norbert, the Saint stands, as in the oil sketch, on the single figure of Tanchelm, and holds a monstrance. Although the more general compositional type of a standing figure of a Saint, seen somewhat from below, is certainly found elsewhere in Rubens' work – particularly in his designs of 1620-21 for the ceiling decorations of the Jesuit church in Antwerp² – no other work by the artist can be convincingly linked with the present drawing, and its purpose remains a mystery.

Considering individually each of the three media that Rubens has used here, the free, flowing pen lines serve to outline the figures, to define their facial types and expressions, and to imbue details such as the saint's hand and crozier with a sense of movement and energy. Complementing this structure of lines, the broad swathes of very dense, black chalk provide subtle, textured modelling, while the extremely flat, dark brown wash, reserved for the areas of deepest shadow, provides a further technical and visual contrast. In the inspired hands of Rubens, these three media together create an image of great monumentality, power and energy, which also manages to remain refined and somehow intimate.

Numerous parallels can be found in Rubens' other drawings for the handling of the pen in the present work. A double-sided sheet of studies in the Royal Collection, which Anne-Marie Logan dates circa 1612-14, is particularly close, as is a study of The Continence of Scipio, circa 1616-18, in Berlin.³ There are rather fewer drawings in which the chalk and the wash are used precisely as they are here, but in both cases comparisons can still be found. Chalk of this texture and tone is more familiar from Rubens' portraits (e.g. the study of Marie de Médicis, of circa 1622⁴) than from his composition or figural studies, but does occur here and there in the latter context, for example in a circa 1616 Study for the Christ Child, in Vienna.⁵ As for the wash, in the Vienna Assumption of the Virgin⁶ – also a work of the 1610s – there are very similar areas of heavy, flat wash.

In terms of the combining of these three techniques within a single drawing, perhaps the closest parallel to this newly discovered sheet is the splendid Man on Horseback (Study for the Portrait of the Duke of Lerma), drawn in September 1603 and now in Munich.⁷  The pen-work in that drawing is more detailed and the execution generally tighter than here, but there are considerable similarities in the density of black chalk, and its combination with rather flat areas of wash, especially towards the left of the sheet. The Munich drawing is very likely an earlier work than this, but the comparison highlights how innovative Rubens was, on a technical level, throughout his career, and how ready he always was to experiment with highly original combinations of media in his drawings.

In the absence of any information regarding the purpose for which this drawing was made, it can only be rather tentatively dated, but collectively the various comparisons mentioned above suggest that it was most probably executed some time in the late 1610s. Perhaps, like the St. Norbert oil sketch, it was made in connection with a sculptural project.

1.     See Peter C. Sutton and Marjorie E. Wiseman, Drawn by the Brush, Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens, exh. cat., Bruce Museum of Arts and Sciences, Greenwich, CT, and Berkley Art Museum, University of California, 2004-05 pp. 134-37, cat. 13.

2.        Although the paintings that Rubens made for this church were destroyed by fire in 1718, the scheme is recorded though the commission documents, and through early 18^th-century copies made by Jacob de Wit and Christian Benjamin Müller. Most broadly similar to our drawing in composition are the representations of St. Athanasius overcoming Arius, and St Ambrose, though both are much more foreshortened, as befits their intended location. See John Rupert Martin, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard. Part I. The Ceiling Paintings for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp, London/New York 1968, cats. 19a, 19b, 34.

3.         Anne-Marie Logan, Peter Paul Rubens. The Drawings, exhibition catalogue, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005, cats. 31, 33

4.         London, Victoria & Albert Museum. Logan, op. cit., cat. 76

5.         Idem, cat. 59

6.         Idem, cat. 43

7.         Idem, cat. 13