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Lot Essay
Spontaneous, rapidly worked head studies painted ad vivum in the studio are among Rubens’s most engaging works and demonstrate the artist’s remarkable capacity for psychological characterization. Such paintings, which might record the same face from multiple angles, were principally made for use in larger, multi-figural compositions.
Documentary evidence suggests that Rubens himself ascribed particular value to these intimate works and retained them for the entirety of his career. They may even have been among the works Rubens preserved, perhaps under lock and key, in his cantoor, which in the seventeenth century variously meant both a chest for storing important documents and a study. The Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, preserves a number of drawn copies after Rubens’s drawings after the antique and head studies by Rubens’s pupil Willem Panneels and other artists active in the studio. A number of these drawings bear an inscription indicating the source material was specially stored in Rubens’s cantoor, perhaps one of two rooms on an upper floor in the Italian wing of the master’s house (for further information, see K. Lohse Belkin and F. Healy, A House of Art: Rubens as Collector, exhibition catalogue, Antwerp, 2004, pp. 298-299; for two such drawings, see nos. 80 and 81 in that catalogue). These works suggest that such studies also played an integral part in Rubens’s training of pupils.
The present, recently rediscovered sketch is executed on an unevenly chamfered panel bearing the mark of Rubens’s favored panel maker, Michiel Vrient, who became a master in 1615 and produced panels until his death in 1637. The sketch bears a number of hallmarks of the artist, including the use of a horizontal imprimatura, spontaneous and fluid wet-in-wet brushstrokes, several pentimenti around the woman’s chin and earlobe and evidence of underdrawing in red chalk, notably in the upper righthand corner. On stylistic grounds, the painting probably dates to the mid-1620s, a dating that is supported by recent dendrochronological study of a related head in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (fig. 1), which could only have been painted in or after 1626 (see N. van Hout, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard: Part XX (2): Study Heads, I, London and Turnhout, 2020, p. 261, under no. 111).
Further support for this proposed dating is found in other works where the woman’s head appears. Its earliest known appearance is in Rubens’s The Assumption of the Virgin of circa 1625-6 (fig. 2; Antwerp, Cathedral of Our Lady). Tellingly, this head is missing from Rubens’s preparatory oil sketch of circa 1622-5 (The Hague, Mauritshuis), a point that strongly suggests the artist may only have painted it while working on this important commission. The head was subsequently used for the figure of Saint Elizabeth in Rubens’s late lost The Marriage of the Virgin, the composition of which is known today through a print by Schelte Adamsz. Bolswert (fig. 3). The head also appears in reverse in two late altarpieces of around 1633-5, The Holy Family with St. Anne (Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art) and The Virgin and Child with St. Elizabeth and St. John the Baptist (Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery).
The model for the head study in Munich was once thought to be Rubens’s mother, Maria Pypelinckx. Though tantalizing, the idea is now seen to be, in the words of Nico van Hout, ‘a fiction born of romantic fantasy’ (op. cit., p. 262), for, among other reasons, Pypelinckx had passed away in 1608, nearly two decades before Rubens executed this study. Nevertheless, the sympathy with which Rubens freely and sympathetically captures this woman in mourning dress suggests she must have been someone with whom he was intimately familiar.
We are grateful to Ben van Beneden for endorsing the attribution to Peter Paul Rubens on the basis of first hand examination.
A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE
A great deal is known regarding the contents of Rubens’s house and studio due to the detailed inventory drawn up following his death, evidently in preparation for the sale of many of his possessions. While the original Flemish inventory is lost, two contemporary translations exist: one in French and printed in Antwerp, a unique copy of which is in the Bibliothéque nationale in Paris, and a letter written by Sir Balthazar Gerbier on 14 July 1640 to King Charles I informing the King of the opportunity to acquire works from the estate, now in the Courtauld Institute in London. At the end of the printed listing is an unnumbered item described as 'Vne quantit des visages au vif, sur toile, & fonds de bois, tant de Mons. Rubens, que de Mons. Van Dyck’, or, in Gerbier’s phrasing 'A parcell of Faces made after the life, vppon bord and Cloth as well by sr Peter Rubens as van dyke’ (quoted in K. Lohse Belkin and F. Healy, op. cit., p. 333). A number of these studies evidently appeared on the market shortly after Rubens’s death, as they feature in a list compiled that same year among the pictures acquired from Rubens’s estate by the Antwerp dealer Matthijs Musson. Whether the present study was among these works can unfortunately not be said with certitude, though its reemergence after nearly four centuries presents an opportunity to appreciate afresh the genius of one of Europe’s leading artists and man of letters in the seventeenth century.
Documentary evidence suggests that Rubens himself ascribed particular value to these intimate works and retained them for the entirety of his career. They may even have been among the works Rubens preserved, perhaps under lock and key, in his cantoor, which in the seventeenth century variously meant both a chest for storing important documents and a study. The Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, preserves a number of drawn copies after Rubens’s drawings after the antique and head studies by Rubens’s pupil Willem Panneels and other artists active in the studio. A number of these drawings bear an inscription indicating the source material was specially stored in Rubens’s cantoor, perhaps one of two rooms on an upper floor in the Italian wing of the master’s house (for further information, see K. Lohse Belkin and F. Healy, A House of Art: Rubens as Collector, exhibition catalogue, Antwerp, 2004, pp. 298-299; for two such drawings, see nos. 80 and 81 in that catalogue). These works suggest that such studies also played an integral part in Rubens’s training of pupils.
The present, recently rediscovered sketch is executed on an unevenly chamfered panel bearing the mark of Rubens’s favored panel maker, Michiel Vrient, who became a master in 1615 and produced panels until his death in 1637. The sketch bears a number of hallmarks of the artist, including the use of a horizontal imprimatura, spontaneous and fluid wet-in-wet brushstrokes, several pentimenti around the woman’s chin and earlobe and evidence of underdrawing in red chalk, notably in the upper righthand corner. On stylistic grounds, the painting probably dates to the mid-1620s, a dating that is supported by recent dendrochronological study of a related head in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich (fig. 1), which could only have been painted in or after 1626 (see N. van Hout, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard: Part XX (2): Study Heads, I, London and Turnhout, 2020, p. 261, under no. 111).
Further support for this proposed dating is found in other works where the woman’s head appears. Its earliest known appearance is in Rubens’s The Assumption of the Virgin of circa 1625-6 (fig. 2; Antwerp, Cathedral of Our Lady). Tellingly, this head is missing from Rubens’s preparatory oil sketch of circa 1622-5 (The Hague, Mauritshuis), a point that strongly suggests the artist may only have painted it while working on this important commission. The head was subsequently used for the figure of Saint Elizabeth in Rubens’s late lost The Marriage of the Virgin, the composition of which is known today through a print by Schelte Adamsz. Bolswert (fig. 3). The head also appears in reverse in two late altarpieces of around 1633-5, The Holy Family with St. Anne (Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art) and The Virgin and Child with St. Elizabeth and St. John the Baptist (Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery).
The model for the head study in Munich was once thought to be Rubens’s mother, Maria Pypelinckx. Though tantalizing, the idea is now seen to be, in the words of Nico van Hout, ‘a fiction born of romantic fantasy’ (op. cit., p. 262), for, among other reasons, Pypelinckx had passed away in 1608, nearly two decades before Rubens executed this study. Nevertheless, the sympathy with which Rubens freely and sympathetically captures this woman in mourning dress suggests she must have been someone with whom he was intimately familiar.
We are grateful to Ben van Beneden for endorsing the attribution to Peter Paul Rubens on the basis of first hand examination.
A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE
A great deal is known regarding the contents of Rubens’s house and studio due to the detailed inventory drawn up following his death, evidently in preparation for the sale of many of his possessions. While the original Flemish inventory is lost, two contemporary translations exist: one in French and printed in Antwerp, a unique copy of which is in the Bibliothéque nationale in Paris, and a letter written by Sir Balthazar Gerbier on 14 July 1640 to King Charles I informing the King of the opportunity to acquire works from the estate, now in the Courtauld Institute in London. At the end of the printed listing is an unnumbered item described as 'Vne quantit des visages au vif, sur toile, & fonds de bois, tant de Mons. Rubens, que de Mons. Van Dyck’, or, in Gerbier’s phrasing 'A parcell of Faces made after the life, vppon bord and Cloth as well by sr Peter Rubens as van dyke’ (quoted in K. Lohse Belkin and F. Healy, op. cit., p. 333). A number of these studies evidently appeared on the market shortly after Rubens’s death, as they feature in a list compiled that same year among the pictures acquired from Rubens’s estate by the Antwerp dealer Matthijs Musson. Whether the present study was among these works can unfortunately not be said with certitude, though its reemergence after nearly four centuries presents an opportunity to appreciate afresh the genius of one of Europe’s leading artists and man of letters in the seventeenth century.