A generous selection of Rubens' best drawings, chiefly portraits and religious and mythical scenes, that fully reveal his supreme artistic gifts. Publisher's note.

Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing re-examines the early graphic practice of the preeminent northern Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640) in light of early modern traditions of eloquence, particularly as promoted in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Flemish, Neostoic circles of philologist, Justus Lipsius (1547–1606). Focusing on the roles that rhetorical and pedagogical considerations played in the artist’s approach to disegno during and following his formative Roman period (1600–08), this volume highlights Rubens’s high ambitions for the intimate medium of drawing as a primary site for generating meaningful and original ideas for his larger artistic enterprise. As in the Lipsian realm of writing personal letters – the humanist activity then described as a cognate activity to the practice of drawing – a Senecan approach to eclecticism, a commitment to emulation, and an Aristotelian concern for joining form to content all played important roles. Two chapter-long studies of individual drawings serve to demonstrate the relevance of these interdisciplinary rhetorical concerns to Rubens’s early practice of drawing. Focusing on Rubens’s Medea Fleeing with Her Dead Children (Los Angeles, Getty Museum), and Kneeling Man (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), these close-looking case studies demonstrate Rubens’s commitments to creating new models of eloquent drawing and to highlighting his own status as an inimitable maker. Demonstrating the force and quality of Rubens’s intellect in the medium then most associated with the closest ideas of the artist, such designs were arguably created as more robust pedagogical and preparatory models that could help strengthen art itself for a new and often troubled age.

Drawings played a crucial role in the artistic practices of the three great giants of Flemish Baroque art, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), and Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678). Accompanying an exhibition featuring the most spectacular drawings by them in the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, *Power and Grace* demonstrates just how differently drawings functioned in the oeuvres of these artists as well as highlights the distinctive features of their graphic styles and the impact they had on each other. The Morgan is particularly well suited to tell this story, for its holdings of Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens drawings are unparalleled in the United States.

An extraordinary history of Netherlandish drawing, focused on the training and skill of artists during the long 17th century With a lively narrative thread and thematic chapters, this book offers an exceptional introduction to Dutch and Flemish drawing during the long 17th century. Victoria Sancho Lobis discusses the many roles of drawing in artistic training, its function in the production of works in other media, and its emergence as a medium in its own right. Beautifully illustrated with some 120 drawings by artists including Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Hendrick Goltzius, Gerrit von Honthorst, and Jacob De Gheyn, this book surveys current methodologies of studying these works and features a brief history of Dutch papermaking and watermarks as well as a glossary. Paying careful attention to materials and techniques, and informed by recent conservation treatments, Lobis explains how to look at these drawings as records of experimentation and skill, true windows into the artist’s mind.

Among the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum's extensive holdings of Old Master drawings, the collection of drawings by the Antwerp masters Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens and Anthony van Dyck stand out as absolute highlights. This generously illustrated publication examines 70 of their best drawings, discussing not only the significance of these works, but also their provenance, attribution and dating. It also sets the work in context, by considering the work of a variety of contemporaries on the seventeenth-century Flemish scene (many of whom were influenced directly by the work of these masters), and by including essays on a variety of topics of art and culture in Antwerp. This book will be a major contribution to the study of seventeenth-century Northern European art.