Sir Peter Paul Rubens

P. Norton, 1831;
Charles T.D. Crews, London, by 1906;
His (deceased) sale, London, Christie's, 1 July 1915, lot 81, £31.10s to Asscher (as Van Dyck);
Verkade Collection, Delft;
His sale et al, Amsterdam, Mak, 5 June 1928, lot 172, for Dfl. 1,200 to Kolff (as Van Dyck):
Probably acquired shortly thereafter by the family of the present owners, and certainly in their possession by 1930.

London, Guildhall, 1906, no. 118;
Brussels, Nouveau Palais du Cinquantenaire, Exposition de l'art ancien. L'art belge au XVIIe siècle, June-November 1910, no. 157 (as Van Dyck).

 

J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné...., vol. III, London 1831, p. 104, no. 368 (as Van Dyck);
J. Guiffrey, Antoine van Dyck, Paris 1882, p. 255, no. 302 (as Van Dyck);
L. Burchard and R-A. d'Hulst, Rubens Drawings, vol. I, Brussels 1963, pp. 131-33, under no. 79 (as Rubens?);
K.L. Belkin, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard. The Costume Book , vol. XXIV, Brussels 1978, p. 103, under no. 14v, and p. 128, under no. 24, reproduced fig. 71 (as Van Dyck?);
A. Balis, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard. Hunting scenes, vol. XVIII, 1986, part II, p. 196, no. 15, reproduced fig. 92 (as by Rubens?).

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external expert and not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is on a fine thin oak panel. There is a narrow additional strip added along the base (about two centimeters wide) with an old wider supporting strut behind. Although this is old it appears possibly to be the replacement of an original added strip. A further gratuitous addition to the panel has extended the originally quite narrow horizontal painting upwards, doubling its height. This also old and the joint has remained firm although there is a certain amount of discoloured old retouching along both this and the lower joint. The original horizontal sketch between the two extra bands of somewhat later paint is rather thin, with some patchy retouching in places but with vivid characteristic brushwork still strong and in some places undisturbed by later retouching. There is a certain amount of retouching (well integrated) visible under ultra violet light mainly across the legs of the horses in the lower centre. The upper central area is fairly well intact essentially, if thin, while patches of cruder old retouching stand out for instance on the rump of the horse on the right, on the neck of the lady beside the man holding up his hawk and elsewhere, such as between some of the figures above and below. The slender layer of grey drawn across the priming as a ground for such sketches was clearly most vulnerable in the early years of the painting and since, but the essence of the sketch with rapid brushwork overlaying this, survives with surprising life and Rubensian vigour, if somewhat fainter naturally. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Unseen in public for over eighty years, and long considered to be the work of Van Dyck, this sketch is here definitively restored to Rubens for the first time. Hunting scenes such as this formed a popular and important part of Rubens'  oeuvre and this sketch is typical of their style and composition. Here, a group of six or seven riders, all but two of them women, are seen at the conclusion of a successful chase, gathered on their horses while their pages hold their mounts and stoop to gather the heron the hawks have brought down.

As falconry was declining in popularity in Rubens' day, it is very likely that this sketch was inspired by paintings or tapestries dating from the 15th or 16th centuries. In his youth Rubens had, for example, copied Burgundian hunting scenes, and one such Hawking party survives in his Costume Book in the British Museum, which dates from around or before 1600 .¹ Rubens interest in the tapestry designs of  Bernaert van Orley (c.1488-1541) is shown by another drawing of a hawking party, which belonged to Rubens himself and is now in the British Museum. The drawing is by Van Orley, but has been enlarged and added to by Rubens himself, and its figures and costume are strongly remininscent of the present work, for example a very similar figure to that of the page found on the extreme right of this sketch, but reversed, appears as an escort to a mounted lady.² The figure of the falconer on the right of the sketch would certainly appear to be dressed in an archaic costume typical of these scenes.

Although hunting scenes occupied a prominent part in his oeuvre this sketch cannot be related to any surviving large scale work by Rubens. Its relationship to a pen drawing by Rubens, formerly in the Thormälen collection in Cologne, has, however, always been noted by scholars (see fig. 1). In this drawing, generally dated to around 1612-15³ the relationship with the sketch is most apparent in the positions of the horses, the first and second from the right being reversed from those first and second from the left in the drawing. There is a further similarity between the figure of a lady riding side-saddle and holding a hawk in the centre of the sketch with another such figure who appears on a sheet of studies by Rubens at Windsor Castle, many preparatory for Rubens' great Wolf Hunt  of 1617 in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. This drawing Burchard and d'Hulst also date to around 1615-16.⁴

But while such analogies with Rubens' drawings might also suggest a dating for this sketch to the second decade of the seventeenth century, Balis prefers instead to assign a date nearer 1630 for this painting on the basis of other works in oil from this period. The lady in the centre, who leans forward slightly in her saddle closely resembles that of Queen Dido in Rubens' lost sketch of Aeneas helping Queen Dido to dismount  which is generally dated to around 1630-33.⁵  The horseman on the right of the picture, who is shown casting up his hawk, is also very similar to that on the right of the Landscape with Saint George  of 1629-30 now in the Royal Collection in Buckingham Palace.⁶ The rapid but rhythmic sketching of the forms, with flowing contours and relatively light and infrequent highlights are all stylistic features of other sketches by Rubens from this period, notably, for example, the Battle of Ivry  (Bayonne, Musée Bonnat) or the Triumph of Henri IV (London, Wallace Collection) from the late 1620s.⁷ As Balis has observed, the original dimensions of this panel were around 23 by 50 cm., bringing it closer in format to the many sketches of similar subjects painted by Rubens for the King of Spain later in the decade, but other than emphasising Rubens' predilection for this narrow horizontal format for works of this type, the stylistic differences do not allow for any closer connection to be made.

We are grateful to Dr. Arnout Balis for confirming the attribution to Rubens following first hand inspection of this lot.

1. Balis, op. cit., 1986, reproduced fig. 1.
2. Inv. 5237-77. See J. Rowlands in the exhibition catalogue , Rubens. Drawings and sketches, London, British Museum 1977, p. 56., no. 49, reproduced.
3. Both Muller-Hofstede and Balis, however, prefer a later dating to around 1630.
4. Balis, op. cit., p. 105, cat. 2a, reproduced fig. 38.
5. J.S. Held, The oil sketches of Peter Paul Rubens, Princeton 1980, vol. I, p. 316, no. 229, plate 238
6. W. Adler, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard. Vol. XVIII, Landscapes and Hunting scenes, part I, Oxford 1982, p. 119, no. 35, fig. 93;
7, Held, op. cit, pp. 127-29, nos. 82 and 83, plates 85 and 86.