by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on October 14, 2026
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
The visitors gather around a child
In Peter Paul Rubens's Adoration of the Magi, the meeting takes place in a crowded shelter. Mary sits at the right, supporting the infant Jesus as an elderly visitor kneels close to him. The child leans forward and puts a hand on the man's bald head; the man kisses his foot. Behind the kneeling figure, other visitors, servants and soldiers press into the darkness. Rubens makes a small exchange of touch the focus of a picture filled with costly clothing and many faces.
This is the Lyon Adoration, one of several paintings of the subject associated with Rubens. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon[1] dates its canvas around 1617–18, records its size as 251 × 328 centimetres, and gives it inventory number A 118. Those details matter because Rubens returned to the Magi at different points in his career. A painting with the same title in another museum is not automatically this large, wide composition. In the reproduction here, Mary is at the right and the richly dressed visitors advance from the left.
At a Glance
- ArtistPeter Paul Rubens [1]
- DateAbout 1617–18 [1]
- MediumOil on canvas [1]
- Dimensions251 × 328 cm [1]
- CollectionMusée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, A 118 [1]
Where this work sits in Rubens's career
The Elevation of the Cross
1609–10The Descent from the Cross
1611–14The Adoration of the Magi
c. 1617–18The Garden of Love
1630–35The Three Graces
1630–35Contents
- What story is shown?
- A crowded composition with a quiet centre
- From oil sketch to the Lyon canvas
- Was it made for an altar?
- Who owns the canvas now?
- What the Vorsterman print preserves
- Which Rubens Adoration is this?
What story is shown?
The subject comes from Matthew 2. Visitors described as magi follow a star to the child Jesus, honour him and present gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. The Gospel does not give the visitors' number or names; the familiar three kings emerge from later tradition, shaped in part by the three gifts. Rubens uses that tradition to show visitors of differing ages and dress arriving together. The Lyon museum[2] cautiously suggests that their diagonal grouping evokes the three ages of life. It is a reading of their arrangement, not a biographical identification of three historical sitters.
The group becomes easier to follow if we begin at the right. Mary supports the child beside straw bedding. Joseph stands nearby. The shelter is a cave adapted into a stable, with brick and timber visible farther back, as the Lyon museum describes it. The infant and the first kneeling visitor are close to the light; the men behind recede into a denser mixture of faces and garments. Rubens lets the gaze move outward from the child along the visitors, then back again through their gestures of approach.
The kneeling man's red mantle spreads across the foreground. A second figure bends toward the child from behind him, while a standing visitor in pale and gold clothing rises at the left. The rich fabrics do not simply decorate the scene. They make a contrast with the rough shelter and straw under the infant. A gold cup filled with coins is conspicuous among the offerings. The material value is unmistakable, but the visitors' movement directs attention away from their possessions and toward the child they have come to honour.
A crowded composition with a quiet centre
The picture is wide enough for Rubens to include more than the Holy Family and three principal visitors. Servants bring gifts, soldiers stand behind them, and onlookers crowd into the narrow space. The museum notes[1] a boy carrying myrrh who looks out from the shadow toward the viewer. He is easy to miss in a small reproduction, but his glance changes the crowd from an anonymous backdrop into a collection of particular responses. Some people lean in, some watch from farther back, and the kneeling visitor has already crossed the space between them and the child.
The strongest movement travels diagonally through the visitors toward Mary and Jesus. A curve of shoulders and bowed heads slows it at the centre. Rubens uses these competing directions to keep the painting active without losing the central encounter. The child is physically tiny beside the adults, yet his bright body and the hands supporting him make him the point at which their movement stops. The effect is both public and intimate: a large procession has arrived, but the foreground action is a person bending to kiss a child's foot.
That difference between scale and focus suits the subject. The people with wealth and rank have travelled to a family in a makeshift shelter. The museum's contrast between straw and brilliant fabric is visible in the painting; it does not require us to turn every textile into a separate symbolic code. Rubens can show the splendour of the visitors while making their deference, rather than their display, the event's meaning.
From oil sketch to the Lyon canvas
The finished picture can be compared with a smaller oil sketch that Sotheby's catalogued in 2012[10]. The auction catalogue identifies its oak panel as preparatory for the Lyon canvas, while explaining that another closely related sketch, formerly with the dealer David Koetser, had already been studied by Julius Held and shown in the 2004–05 Drawn by the Brush exhibition. The two sketches had been confused in the literature because the Stummer family panel remained out of public view until 2010. Their existence is a warning against presenting one small Adoration as the sole settled design stage. Both are distinct from the much larger oil-on-canvas picture in Lyon.
Sotheby's account compares the rediscovered Stummer panel with the finished canvas in concrete terms. In Lyon the figures are drawn closer to the front of the picture, leaving less open space and making the crowd more monumental. Mary's head turns more toward us, while Joseph turns into a clearer profile. A page at the lower left stands straighter; a surprised youth near the infant becomes a more severe older bearded figure. Rubens also defines the ramshackle stable more firmly than in the quick sketch. These are changes in how the story is staged, not just additional paint on a larger surface. The increasingly compressed crowd makes the child's contact with the kneeling king more forceful because there is less room for the eye to escape around it.
The sketch's own condition complicates comparison. The catalogue includes a restorer's report explaining that earlier overpaint had filled in some places where Rubens had only suggested forms. Its later cleaning revealed a lighter, more open design, including a less elaborated area beside Joseph. That account concerns the privately held sketch, not a treatment of the Lyon canvas. A neat reproduction of an oil sketch can hide the fact that its present appearance partly reflects the removal of later work. Here the important point is the sequence visible through a related object: Rubens could try a group quickly, adjust heads and gestures, and then bind the figures more tightly in the final painting.
Sotheby's also links particular heads in the Lyon composition to studies kept for use in Rubens's workshop. Its catalogue proposes a relationship between the Black attendant behind Balthasar and the leftmost view in Rubens's Four Studies of a Head in Brussels[11], now inventoried there as 3176. The Brussels museum confirms the study's identity and Rubens attribution, while the specific connection to Lyon is the auction catalogue's comparison. This does not mean the Brussels canvas records the name or life of the person cast as an attendant. It does show how an observed head could enter a painted biblical crowd and acquire a new role there.
Was it made for an altar?
The Lyon museum considers a private collection likely as the painting's first destination. Its reason is the unusually broad format, which it judges ill-suited to an altar. That is a curatorial inference from the object, not a surviving commission document naming an original owner. The painting is still religious in subject. A private setting could also have allowed sustained close looking at its crowded figures, costly surfaces and exchanges of gesture.
The museum records that the work was later reproduced in engraving and tapestry. One specific printed example can be named: the Museums of Strasbourg catalogue[3] identifies a 1621 engraving by Lucas Vorsterman as made after the painting now in Lyon, A 118. That record gives a firm link between a surviving print and this canvas. It also shows why the painting's afterlife should not be described only in general terms. A print could carry its composition to viewers who never saw the original in France or Antwerp. The tapestry history is noted by Lyon, though an individual tapestry object would need its own catalogue check before being identified here.
The Lyon record says the work was sent to the museum by the French state in 1805. This is a point in its modern collection history, not evidence of who first ordered it. For that earlier question, the current public record supports a probable type of destination rather than a named patron.
The 1805 transfer was not the painting's first documented later move. Sotheby's 2012 catalogue reports that Elector Maximilian II Emanuel of Bavaria bought the Lyon canvas in Antwerp in 1698, from Gijsbrecht van Ceulen, together with other paintings by Rubens. The work subsequently belonged to the Bavarian collections at Schleißheim before its removal in the Napoleonic period. The reported purchase names a known owner roughly eighty years after Rubens made the picture; it still does not supply the person who first commissioned it. The French state's 1805 dispatch and the present Lyon loan are later stages in the same object's history.
Who owns the canvas now?
The French national collection record[5] adds a useful distinction to the Lyon display label. The canvas is recorded as owned by the French state, held administratively in the Louvre's paintings department, and on long-term loan to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, where it is displayed. The same record gives the deposit number A 118, confirms the 1617–18 date, canvas support and dimensions, and identifies the state dispatch to Lyon in 1805. “In the Lyon museum” correctly tells a visitor where to see it; the national record explains its legal and collection status more fully.
Neither the 1805 transfer nor the modern loan identifies the person for whom Rubens first painted the work. That gap is worth keeping open. The museum's suggestion of a private destination follows from the wide format, while the twentieth- and twenty-first-century collection records show where the canvas has been kept. A page that turns either kind of evidence into an original commission would compress two centuries of missing history into an invented patron.
What the Vorsterman print preserves
A drawing between canvas and engraving
The print's preparation has another surviving witness. In his catalogue of Rembrandt drawings[13], Martin Royalton-Kisch identifies a Louvre drawing, INV 20310, as a drawing for Vorsterman's engraving after the Lyon painting. It has the same orientation as the canvas, whereas Vorsterman's printed image reverses it. The Louvre's current record[12] describes a large sheet, 55 × 72.8 centimetres, with pen, washes, chalk, white heightening and marks made for transfer. That combination is consistent with a carefully worked image prepared for movement into another medium. It does not make the sheet an early oil sketch for the painting: it belongs to the later print sequence.
The drawing's authorship is less settled than its place in that sequence. An inventory of Everhard Jabach's collection in 1671 named Van Dyck; a Napoleonic museum inventory listed it under Rubens; the Louvre now catalogues it as a copy after Rubens. Those labels are not three artists working on the same sheet, and the current record does not assign particular passages to Rubens's hand. This distinction is useful when following a successful composition through its many forms. The Lyon canvas, related oil sketches, drawing for the print and Vorsterman engraving each have a different material and evidentiary status. The Louvre drawing helps explain how the design could be translated and reversed; its old inventory attributions do not prove who actually drew every line.
Strasbourg's record for the 1621 engraving[3] gives more than a general statement that the painting was copied. It names Lucas Vorsterman as engraver, dates the print 1621, records a sheet about 57 × 73.6 centimetres, and explicitly links it to the Lyon canvas, A 118. Its description singles out the child placing a hand on a kneeling visitor's head, a turbaned figure behind, other richly dressed visitors and the distant crowd. That combination of details makes the relationship to this particular composition especially secure.
The print would have carried the painting's arrangement into a medium that could be owned and viewed independently of the large canvas. It could preserve the child's touch and the procession of visitors, though it could not reproduce the contrast between Rubens's painted gold, red cloth and straw in the same way. The documented engraving also offers a reason to be precise about afterlife: a print after Rubens is a related work by another maker, not another autograph Adoration and not evidence of a different first patron.
There is a visible change in orientation. Lyon's painting places Mary and the child at the right; Strasbourg describes the Holy Family at the left in Vorsterman's engraving. The printed image reverses the broad left-to-right movement while keeping the child's hand on the kneeling visitor's head as its point of arrival. That matters when comparing reproductions side by side. A reversed copy can still be securely connected to a painting through a distinctive gesture and crowd arrangement, but its directions should not be used to misidentify Lyon's original canvas.
The composition travelled farther than the Vorsterman impression alone. In the Rijksmuseum's catalogue of Rembrandt drawings[6], Peter Schatborn identifies the kneeling visitor in Rembrandt's One of the Three Kings Adoring the Virgin and Child, about 1635–40, as borrowed from this Lyon composition. The route was indirect: the catalogue says Rembrandt worked from an anonymous print issued by C. J. Visscher, itself copied from Vorsterman's engraving. It points to the kneeling figure's profile, robe folds, tonsure and hands as the specific shared features. Rembrandt changed the child conspicuously, drawing a small infant who cannot yet support his head. This is evidence of a motif's movement through prints, not proof that Rembrandt saw the Lyon canvas or that his drawing copies the whole painting. The Rijksmuseum entry calls Rubens's painting “of 1621”; the holding museums' 1617–18 date is followed here, while 1621 belongs securely to Vorsterman's print.
The print also supplied a recognisable figure to a very different later painting. In a study of Gerard de Lairesse's paintings on the infancy of Jesus[8], Robert Schillemans identifies the African king in Lairesse's Adoration of the Kings, dated by the author to about 1665–67, as copied from Vorsterman's print after the Lyon painting. Lairesse did not transplant Rubens's whole scene. He placed that figure against an evening sky and exchanged the crowded stable for imagined ancient ruins. Schillemans connects the ruins to the traditional idea of the palace of King David and reads them as part of Lairesse's different pictorial treatment. One figure could thus remain identifiable while the location, space and overall mood changed. This is firmer evidence for the Lyon composition's reach than a general claim that Rubens influenced later painters: it specifies the borrowed king, the print through which he travelled and what the later painter changed.
The afterlife was local as well as international. The church of Saint-Bruno in Lyon[9] identifies an 1848 Adoration of the Magi by Chloé du Pasquier in its Saint-Irénée chapel as a slightly reduced copy after the Rubens painting in the city's museum. According to the church's account, du Pasquier exhibited her copy at the Lyon Salon in 1848. This is a later painter's independent canvas, not another Rubens original. It shows that the composition could be studied and remade in paint as well as distributed by engraving. The church record does not establish whether du Pasquier worked directly before the museum canvas, from a print, or with both available; the specific route of her copying remains open.
Which Rubens Adoration is this?
Rubens painted the Magi repeatedly. The exact canvas on this page is identified by the Lyon museum's A 118 record, its about 1617–18 dating and its wide 251 × 328 centimetre format. The image here shows that Lyon composition. This identification prevents a common error: importing a date, patron or figure arrangement from another Rubens Adoration merely because the titles match.
The Lyon scene is particularly memorable for the infant's hand resting on the first visitor's head, the kneeling figure's kiss, the broad red cloak, and the mass of attendants closing in behind. Those are the details that should guide a reading of this painting. Comparisons with another Adoration are useful only when each object's museum, date and image are named separately.
Rubens was thinking about these visitors in more than one format at almost the same moment. The Museo de Arte de Ponce's exhibition on his Magi portraits[7] describes three individual busts painted around 1616 for Balthasar Moretus of the Plantin press. A separate head in such a series asks viewers to study a Magus as a person; Lyon's broad narrative canvas sets age, dress and bearing into a shared act of homage. The exhibition cautions that the relation between the busts and Rubens's several large Adoration paintings is complex. They should not be called direct studies for Lyon without specific evidence. Their near-contemporary date does show how persistently Rubens explored the Magi across different kinds of painting and patrons.
Rubens artworks directory
Frequently Asked Questions
It is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, inventory A 118.
The Lyon museum dates it around 1617–18. That is an approximate range for this canvas, not a date to apply to all of Rubens's versions of the subject.
Matthew describes magi and their three kinds of gifts, but does not number or name the visitors. The familiar three-king portrayal belongs to later Christian tradition.
The Lyon museum thinks a private collection was more likely, chiefly because of the canvas's width. Its original commissioner is not identified in the cited record.
Yes. The Museums of Strasbourg catalogue a 1621 engraving by Lucas Vorsterman made after the Lyon canvas and explicitly give its inventory number, A 118.
Sotheby's 2012 catalogue identifies a privately held oil-on-oak sketch as preparatory for the Lyon canvas and distinguishes it from another closely related sketch known to earlier Rubens scholarship. Their attributions and precise relationship should be described with the catalogue attached, rather than treating either panel as the museum's finished painting.
Discussion
Look closely at the encounter between the infant and the first kneeling visitor.
Share an observation about the painting or a reliable source that adds to its history.
Reader Insights
How does Rubens make the small child the centre of a crowded scene?
Which gestures distinguish the kneeling visitor from those still approaching?
What details identify this as the Lyon canvas rather than another Rubens Adoration?
Join the Conversation
Add your reading below, keeping observations specific and evidence clear.
References
- Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, The Adoration of the Magi , object record and interpretation. View source
- Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, French object record. View source
- Musées de Strasbourg, Lucas Vorsterman's 1621 engraving after the Lyon painting. View source
- Gospel of Matthew 2, narrative source. View source
- Louvre national collections, ownership, long-term Lyon loan and 1805 state dispatch for A 118. View source
- Rijksmuseum, Peter Schatborn's catalogue entry for Rembrandt's drawing after a print sequence derived from the Lyon painting. View source
- Museo de Arte de Ponce, exhibition on Rubens's separate Magi portrait series for Balthasar Moretus. View source
- Robert Schillemans, “The Infancy of Jesus and Religious Painting by Gerard de Lairesse,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 12.1 (2020), on the king taken from Vorsterman's print after the Lyon painting. View source
- Church of Saint-Bruno, Lyon, Saint-Irénée chapel record of Chloé du Pasquier's 1848 copy after Rubens. View source
- Sotheby's 2012 specialist catalogue and restorer's report for a related oil sketch, with comparison to the Lyon canvas and reported Bavarian provenance. View source
- Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Rubens, Four Studies of a Head , inv. 3176. View source
- Musée du Louvre, Adoration of the Magi drawing, INV 20310, current attribution and collection history. View source
- Martin Royalton-Kisch, The Drawings of Rembrandt , Benesch 115, identifying the Louvre drawing for Vorsterman's engraving. View source
