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
Three conversations on one sheet
The drawing known as Three Groups of Apostles in a Last Supper does not show a complete supper room. Instead, Peter Paul Rubens set several clusters of men across a sheet of paper. Some turn to one another; others look away or lean forward. The spaces between groups are part of the design. They leave Rubens room to test how different reactions might sit together before arranging an entire scene.
The sheet belongs to the J. Paul Getty Museum, inventory 84.GA.959. The museum's current object record[1] dates it about 1601–02, describes it as pen and brown ink on paper, and gives its dimensions as 29.7 × 43.8 centimetres. Getty's complete title also identifies a different subject on the other side: Three Sketches for Medea and Her Children. The image here shows the recto, the Last Supper studies, rather than the verso's Medea sketches.
The inherited page name calls the work a “Last Supper Sketch.” That is useful as a route to this drawing, but it could suggest a finished composition. Getty describes three independent groups of apostles and two faint individual studies, all presumably connected with a Last Supper design. The drawing offers figures and relationships, not an architectural setting, a fully placed table or a settled account of where each apostle would stand.
At a Glance
- ArtistPeter Paul Rubens [1]
- DateAbout 1601–02 (Getty's current record) [1]
- MediumPen and brown ink on paper [1]
- Dimensions29.7 × 43.8 cm [1]
- CollectionJ. Paul Getty Museum, 84.GA.959 [1]
- Image scopeRecto: three apostle groups; verso has Medea studies [1]
Where this work sits in Rubens's career
Studies for a Last Supper
c. 1601–02The Elevation of the Cross
1609–10The Descent from the Cross
1611–14The Garden of Love
1630–35The Three Graces
1630–35Contents
- What can we see in the apostle groups?
- Words Rubens left beside the figures
- Why draw the Last Supper this way?
- What is on the other side?
- Which Rubens Last Supper is this?
- From Chatsworth to Los Angeles
What can we see in the apostle groups?
At the left, heads and shoulders crowd together. A larger figure seated in the foreground turns across the page, while faces above and behind him seem to form their own exchange. To the right, a group gathers around a bearded man; another figure rises above them. Lower on the sheet, three bust-length figures make a third cluster. Their different heights, head angles and gestures turn each group into a possible fragment of a larger conversation.
These figures are drawn with changes of pressure and density. Quick outlines keep some bodies open to revision. Darker strokes give weight to a shoulder, an arm or a face that Rubens wanted to test more firmly. The difference between faint and emphatic marks is visible even in a reproduction. It shows why an ink drawing can record thought in progress: not every line has the same status, and the artist need not resolve every body before moving to the next.
Getty's published drawing catalogue[2] describes the apostle groups as independent, not as a continuous strip cut out of a lost finished picture. It also mentions two faint studies related to the same theme. Reading the sheet as a set of trials helps explain why one cluster seems to overlap another in the eye without making a coherent single room. Rubens is exploring human responses and arrangements on paper.
The catalogue records a more specific account of where some figure ideas may have come from. It reports Julius Held's proposal that a young apostle with his hands before his chest, repeated in the upper and lower right groups, draws on Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving after Raphael's Last Supper design. Held also related the man at the upper right to Michelangelo's Ezechias spandrel in the Sistine Chapel. These are comparisons made by a scholar, not inscriptions on the Getty sheet identifying the men or proof that the drawing was copied directly in front of those works. Their value is to make the repetition on the page intelligible: Rubens may have tried an inherited pose more than once while testing how it behaved in different groups.
The print comparison also explains how a Last Supper idea could travel. An engraving after Raphael would have offered a portable arrangement of figures, while Rubens's ink sheet leaves figures open to rearrangement. If Held's proposed connection is right, the Getty drawing is neither a simple copy nor an isolated burst of invention. It is a working surface where a remembered or studied model is put into new relationships. The scholarly proposal does not settle the sheet's contested date or link it to one completed altarpiece.
A Getty-supplied description of the drawing[7] identifies the fine pen line and cross-hatching through which Rubens gave the apostles a sense of volume. It places the figures within his study of Italian models, naming Leonardo, Caravaggio and Michelangelo. Those are broad points of reference, not a map that assigns each drawn apostle to a specific source image. The close view of the sheet still matters: hatching can make a shoulder seem solid without making the surrounding group complete, so the pen's different densities preserve the distinction between an explored figure and a finished scene.
Words Rubens left beside the figures
The Getty's cultural-object record[5] transcribes brown-ink words at the upper right of the recto in Rubens's hand. The Latin begins “Gestus magis largi” and refers to more expansive gestures and extended arms. The inscription is not a caption naming apostles; it reads as a working note about how figures should act. Because parts of the transcription are abbreviated or uncertain, a full elegant translation would make the note seem more settled than it is. Its clear value is to show Rubens thinking about gesture on the same paper where he tests groups of bodies.
This changes the way the faint and dark marks can be understood. The drawing is not merely a row of sketches to be admired as spontaneous line. It joins visual trials to a written reminder about the scale of action. A hand extended farther, a torso turned toward a neighbour, or the distance between two figures could change how a future viewer read a supper scene. The note does not prove that every visible apostle was later enlarged in a finished painting; it tells us a concern Rubens had while working on the sheet.
The drawing does not securely name each figure. A beard, turning head or emphatic hand does not by itself prove that we are looking at Peter, Judas or another particular apostle. The larger Last Supper subject involves Christ and the apostles at their final meal, but this recto is about groups of followers rather than a complete narration with every participant identified. A precise cast list would impose certainty that the Getty record does not give.
Why draw the Last Supper this way?
A painter planning a crowded religious scene must solve several problems together: where people sit, how they react, which gestures can be read at a distance and how one group leads to another. This sheet isolates those problems. Rubens can try one arrangement in the upper left, another toward the right and a different set of faces below. The fragments need not all have been intended for the same final painting. Getty's wording is cautious: they are presumably related to a representation of the Last Supper.
The open white areas also make the line of each figure easier to inspect. We can see where an arm crosses a torso, where a head turns from profile toward the viewer, and how a cluster becomes crowded without a painted backdrop. The sheet asks the viewer to follow the changes in Rubens's marks rather than to search for a completed meal. Its energy comes from the quick negotiation among figures.
The work belongs to Rubens's early drawing practice. Getty's current about 1601–02 dating is a useful concise label, but its older museum catalogues[2] have used broader or different ranges. The date should therefore not be made into an exact day or used to claim a documented commission for a final Last Supper. This sheet is a surviving study with a present museum identity; its eventual painted destination is not established by the sources used here.
Another Rubenshuis sheet dated 1607[8] helps show how Rubens could use paper during those years. Its front bears three men in classical robes, whom the museum tentatively interprets as apostles; its back holds a draft letter to painter Cristoforo Roncalli. Rubenshuis cannot connect those three men to an existing painting. The sheet is not the Getty drawing and is not evidence that the Getty groups were intended for the same commission. It does, however, give a separately documented example of Rubens collecting figure ideas on a double-sided sheet while also using the paper for written work. In the Getty object, the writing is a note about gesture and the reverse is a different mythological study. Each face needs to be read on its own terms.
That limit has a history worth explaining. The Getty drawing catalogue[2] reports documents for a 1611 Last Supper altarpiece commission at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Winoc in Bergues and notes that Rubens appears to have made designs before the project fell through. The scholar Paul Monballieu proposed connecting the Getty sheet and another study at Chatsworth to that commission; other specialists discussed the proposal. This is a serious research hypothesis, but the current Getty dating would put the sheet roughly a decade earlier. An early drawing could in principle have been reused for a later project, but the sources do not establish that sequence for this sheet. The documented commission and the attribution of this particular study to it are therefore different claims.
Published Getty dates themselves show the difficulty. A Getty collection history[9] printed about 1608–11, while the 1985 Getty Museum Journal[10] recorded competing ranges of about 1600–04 and about 1611–12. The present label should lead a visitor's quick identification, but these earlier scholarly datings explain why the sheet cannot simply be placed at one secure stage in a known commission. They also make the verso important: the Medea studies must be considered as part of the same physical object's dating, even though their subject is unrelated to the apostles.
What is on the other side?
The verso bears three sketches for Medea and her children, a classical subject separate from the Christian scene on the recto. Getty's full title records both sides because they belong to one physical sheet. The Last Supper image on this page is not evidence that Medea appears among the apostles. Nor does the verso turn the recto into a combined allegory. Rubens used both faces of the paper for distinct studies.
Getty's 2017 exhibition discussion[6] describes the reverse as repeated attempts to imagine Medea carrying her dead children while fleeing Jason. That account gives the reverse a narrative subject without claiming that the three studies are three stages in a final commission. The Getty's object record also transcribes brief notes about Medea and Creusa on that side. The two faces therefore preserve more than economical use of paper: they show the same artist testing different kinds of movement, one among conversational apostle groups and the other within a tragic myth.
That double use is a reminder that a drawing sheet is an object, not just an image cropped for a webpage. A reproduction of the recto lets us inspect the apostle groups, while the title and catalogue record reveal the work on the other side. The physical sheet carries both sets of studies even though only one face can be displayed in a single still image.
Which Rubens Last Supper is this?
Rubens also made a large, completed Last Supper now in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Its painted table, setting and full dramatic arrangement are a different object, made much later. The Getty sheet is not a small photograph of that painting and should not inherit the Brera work's date, dimensions, support or workshop credit. The similarity of subject does not establish a direct preparatory relationship between these two surviving objects.
The Getty study is valuable on its own terms. We see Rubens considering how faces and bodies might answer one another before a whole narrative has been fixed. The separate clusters let us imagine the larger challenge of a Last Supper composition while keeping the actual evidence in view: brown ink, a sheet of paper and figures still being worked out.
From Chatsworth to Los Angeles
The Getty's current provenance record[1] gives a possible earlier owner, Nicolaes Anthoni Flinck, before recording a sale to William Cavendish, second Duke of Devonshire, in 1723. The word possibly matters: Flinck's ownership is a museum lead, not an established first provenance. The sheet then passed through generations of the Devonshire family at Chatsworth until a Christie's sale in London on 3 July 1984, where it was sold to the Getty. The museum's inventory number, 84.GA.959, identifies the drawing after that acquisition. This chain belongs to the sheet with both sets of studies, not to a lost Last Supper painting; it does not tell us who first held it in Rubens's lifetime.
The dating remains a research limit. Getty's current object record uses about 1601–02, while its earlier catalogue and cultural-object vocabulary have used broader early ranges. The physical sheet, Rubens's inscriptions and the two subjects are secure; the exact order in which he drew each face and any completed painting for which the apostles were intended are not. Keeping those boundaries visible makes the modest-sized drawing a more informative object than an imagined fragment of the much later Brera altarpiece.
Rubens artworks directory
Frequently Asked Questions
No. It is a pen-and-ink drawing with three independent apostle groups and two faint related studies, rather than a complete painted supper scene.
It is in the J. Paul Getty Museum, inventory 84.GA.959.
Getty's current object record dates it about 1601–02. Older museum publications have used broader or different ranges, so the precise dating should remain qualified.
The verso carries three studies for Medea and her children, a distinct classical subject.
The sources used here do not establish that link. The Brera painting is a much later, separate finished work.
Discussion
Look closely at how Rubens tests several groups of apostles on a single sheet.
Share an observation about the drawing or a reliable source that adds to its history.
Reader Insights
How do the gaps between figure groups change the way you read the sheet?
Which changes of line weight suggest that Rubens was still testing the arrangement?
What can the recto show about a Last Supper idea without identifying every apostle?
Join the Conversation
Add your reading below, keeping observations specific and evidence clear.
References
- J. Paul Getty Museum, Three Groups of Apostles in a Last Supper (recto); Three Sketches for Medea and Her Children (verso), 84.GA.959. View source
- J. Paul Getty Museum, European Drawings , catalogue entry 90. View source
- Getty Open Content Program, image use and credit guidance. View source
- Pinacoteca di Brera, the separate finished Last Supper. View source
- Getty CONA object record, recto and verso inscriptions and physical description. View source
- Getty, Drawing: The Art of Change , discussion of the Medea verso. View source
- J. Paul Getty Museum description of the sheet on Google Arts & Culture, including pen technique and Italian sources. View source
- Rubenshuis, Rubens's separate 1607 sheet with three robed men and a draft letter. View source
- Getty, The J. Paul Getty Museum and Its Collections , earlier 1608–11 date. View source
- Getty Museum Journal 13 (1985), record of competing early dates. View source
