After Lucas van Leyden, retouched by Peter Paul Rubens (Siegen 1577 - 1640 Antwerp)

Pierre Crozat (1665-1740), Paris, his numbering in pen and black ink, lower right: 23 (L.3612);
Lord Rennell of Rodd;
sale, London, Sotheby's, 10 December 1968, lot 56 (as Rubens after Lucas van Leyden);
sale, London, Sotheby's, 9 April 1970, lot 79 (bought by Horne);
sale, London, Christie's, 26-27 March 1974, lot 162

M. Jaffe, Rubens and Italy, Oxford 1977, p. 15 and 105, note 31 (as Rubens);
K. Lohse Belkin, Rubens. Copies and Adaptations from Renaissance and Later Artists: German and Flemish Artists, (Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard Part XXVI), London/Turnhout 2009, vol. I, pp. 233-4, no. 118, reproduced vol. II, fig. 327

Hereford, Hereford City Art Gallery, 1967, no. 5 (as Flemish School early XVIIth century)

As has been much described in the literature, Rubens’s working method involved not only copying works by other masters, in oil as well as in drawn media, but also collecting drawn copies made by other artists, copies which he frequently reworked extensively.¹  Very occasionally he also seems to have reworked independent drawings by other artists, but the vast majority of these reworked sheets started life as copies of another work.  More than two hundred drawings by other artists, reworked by Rubens to a greater or lesser extent, are known.

In this case, as Belkin has described (see Literature), the original, rather rubbed chalk drawing is a copy after the central figure group in Lucas van Leyden’s 1515 engraving, The Triumph of Mordecai.  Lucas was clearly an artist in whom Rubens was particularly interested: he repaired or retouched some five surviving drawings relating to Lucas, and owned at least three paintings by or attributed to him.²  Here, Rubens’s intervention is mostly to be found in the heads of the main figures and the horse, where he has redrawn faces, profiles and eyes with the point of the brush, in brown ink.  Rubens also added brown wash in some areas, notably on the man carrying a lance, and on the cloak worn by the turbaned man behind the horse.

Drawing stylistic parallels with works such as the Costume Book, Belkin dates Rubens’s reworking in this drawing fairly early, circa 1610.  

1.  See A.M. Logan and M. Plomp, Peter Paul Rubens, The Drawings, exh. cat., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005, pp. 4-7, 15-18

2.  Belkin, cit., p. 232, under cat. 117