Volume 52, Number 6 · April 7, 2005
The Homer of Painting
By Andrew Butterfield
Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens
Catalog of the exhibition by Peter C. Sutton and Marjorie E. Wieseman with Nico van Hout
An exhibition at the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science, Greenwich, Connecticut, October 2, 2004–January 30, 2005; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, March 2–May 15, 2005; and the Cincinnati Art Museum, June 11–September 11, 2005.
Yale University Press, 272 pp., $60.00
Peter Paul Rubens: The Drawings
Catalog of the exhibition by Anne-Marie Logan, with Michiel C. Plomp
An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,January 15–April 3, 2005.
Yale University Press, 332 pp., $65.00; $50.00 (paper)
This winter the New York region has been blessed with two spectacular exhibitions of the work of Peter Paul Rubens, the great Flemish painter. At the Bruce Museum in Greenwich until January 30 (and continuing on to the Berkeley Art Museum and the Cincinnati Art Museum) was a small but brilliant show of the master's oil sketches. On view now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a major survey of his drawings, the first ever held in this country. Both shows concentrate on Rubens's preparatory studies, rather than on his finished paintings, and this emphasis is illuminating. Rubens was one of the supreme draftsmen in the history of European art; and he was perhaps the leading exponent of the oil sketch, a medium with which he was closely identified until well into the nineteenth century. To see these shows together was to glimpse the heart of his artistic achievement.
Review, 3319 words
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