Peter Paul Rubens Prints

From a painted work to a printed image

Rubens understood that a printed image could carry a composition beyond the church, palace or private room for which its painting had been made. He worked with engravers and woodcutters to translate designs into images that could circulate in multiple impressions. That collaboration gives him a central role in a print's history, but it does not make every impression a print made by Rubens's own hand. The plate cutter, woodcutter, designer, publisher and sometimes a preparatory draughtsman each need to be identified from the particular object's record.

The picture above is the Prado's Three Graces, 1630–35, oil on oak panel, inventory P001670. It is a painting, not a printed impression. The image is retained as the established splash for this route and serves to remind us what could happen when a painted design was reproduced for other viewers. No specific print of The Three Graces is pictured here. The painting's own page treats its physical object and subject; the examples below are actual prints recorded in museum collections.

At a Glance

• Local print impressionsNone currently catalogued
• Verified examplesMet Vorsterman, Pontius and Jegher records ^[1][4][5]
• Image aboveThe Three Graces, Prado P001670: painting ^[8]
• Print creditName the printmaker and source artist ^[1][2]

Why Rubens worked with printmakers

An altarpiece has an original place. A court painting addresses a particular room and audience. A print can travel and be collected far from either. The Getty describes Rubens's organised effort to reproduce and distribute images after his paintings, drawings and tapestry designs. The project accelerated around 1619, when he obtained legal privileges for authorised reproductions and engaged printmakers whose work he could supervise. The printed sheet could extend recognition of a composition while creating a new object with its own scale, technique and history.

It is easy to describe such prints merely as publicity, but that misses their artistic demands. A painter could use colour, brushwork and a large surface to separate light from shadow. An engraver had to create tonal changes through lines cut into a metal plate; a woodcutter worked with a carved block. The printmaker decided how closely spaced lines, cross-hatching and untouched paper would suggest the effect of paint. Rubens could ask for fidelity to his design or correct a working drawing, but a successful impression still depended on the printmaker's skill.

The challenge explains why a printed translation can alter the experience of a familiar painting. A broad painted shadow may become a dense net of lines. A figure near the left edge can move to the right when a plate reverses the source. Colours can be converted into different weights of black against the paper. The sheet may be much smaller than the original wall or panel, inviting a viewer to hold and inspect it. These changes should be described as properties of the print, rather than as mistakes measured against a photograph of the painting.

The relationship was also commercial. Privileges in the seventeenth century were legal controls over authorised publication in particular territories. The Met says Rubens secured them in the Netherlands and France. They should not be treated as a modern, worldwide copyright covering every later image. A particular sheet may carry an inscription or state that tells us more about its publisher and permission; such a claim belongs to that impression's catalogue entry, not to every print after Rubens by default.

Supervision did not remove disagreement. A 1966 Metropolitan Museum study of Rubens and his printmakers discusses his 1622 complaint to Otto van Veen about Vorsterman's pace and the value of the designs. It also reports a 1635 letter to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc concerning a Paris dispute over an alleged violation of the French privilege. These accounts show that timing, quality, ownership and authorised copying were negotiated, not settled once and for all when a plate was commissioned. The study uses edited and translated correspondence; without checking the original-language letters, the safer course is to summarise its documented point rather than quote Rubens's words or claim a court outcome it does not establish.

A named example: Vorsterman's Saint Lawrence

The Metropolitan Museum's Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, object 51.501.7125, is an engraving of 1621 by Lucas Vorsterman I after Peter Paul Rubens. The museum records it as the second of two states in the Hollstein catalogue. Its classification is Prints, and its trimmed sheet measures 39 × 27.6 centimetres. These details make it an identifiable printed object, rather than a generic image “by Rubens.” Vorsterman's name answers who engraved the plate; Rubens's name answers whose composition was translated.

The source was Rubens's painting of Saint Lawrence, then in a Brussels church and now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. The Met notes that Vorsterman's engraving shows the painting in reverse. A viewer comparing painting and print should therefore expect the direction of the figures to change. The preparatory drawing was made by one of Rubens's assistants, possibly Anthony van Dyck according to the museum. “Possibly” is the important word: it does not convert a suggestion into a confirmed Van Dyck credit. The known sequence joins painting, assistant's drawing and Vorsterman's engraved plate, with different kinds of authorship at each stage.

The Met also identifies a dedication to Laurentius Beyerlinck, the Antwerp humanist who shared the saint's name. A dedication was part of the printed sheet's social setting; it is not information supplied by the original painted altarpiece alone. This is one reason to inspect the margins and inscriptions of a print, not only its central image. The painting can explain the composition, while the impression tells us about publication, audience and the way the design was presented in 1621.

Pontius and the Assumption: correcting a working drawing

The Getty documents a different collaboration around an Assumption of the Virgin print. In 1624, Paulus Pontius prepared a black-chalk drawing after Rubens's monumental altarpiece. Rubens then revised that intermediate drawing with ink, wash, gouache and oil paint, including a figure of Christ related to the altarpiece's original setting. Pontius translated the revised design into an engraving. The Getty points to an inscription acknowledging Rubens's permission and naming Pontius as engraver. Here the working drawing was neither a finished print nor a simple unaltered copy of a painting: it was a stage at which the painter intervened visibly.

The Met catalogues a Pontius Assumption of the Virgin impression as 51.501.7324, 1624, engraving, credited to Pontius after Rubens. Its sheet is approximately 64.4 × 44.1 centimetres and has an arched format. Those facts belong to the printed object. They should not be moved onto Rubens's altarpiece or onto a separate drawing in Getty custody. The example shows how a careful print account follows related objects without fusing them into one artwork.

The word “after” can sometimes be mistaken for a weak attribution. In a print record it often states that the engraver made a new object following another artist's design. Pontius is the maker of the printed impression; Rubens is the source artist and, in the Getty's documented preparation, an active supervisor of the design. The two roles are complementary rather than competing claims to have cut the same plate.

Jegher, woodcuts and changing a composition

Rubens also worked with Christoffel Jegher on woodcuts in the 1630s. A woodcut is made from a carved block, not an engraved metal plate. Its lines and dark areas come from a different physical process. The Met's Garden of Love right block, object 30.53.17b, is catalogued as a woodcut by Jegher after Rubens from the 1630s. The museum explains that two drawings associated with Rubens and finished by Jegher served as models for the two blocks, and that the woodcuts reversed those drawings.

The printed Garden of Love was not a straightforward reduced photograph of the painting. The Met describes the design changed into a two-part frieze: figures were brought forward and architecture at the top was cropped. The woodcut medium also encouraged emphatic contours and tonal contrasts. These changes are visible evidence of translation across media. They do not mean Rubens abandoned the painting's theme; they show how an image had to be rethought for a pair of printed blocks and a new audience.

The Getty discusses Jegher's Susanna and the Elders as another collaboration, stressing its complex cross-hatching and energetic contours. The museum qualifies its suggestion that Rubens probably drew directly on the block. “Probably” should remain a qualification unless a particular block or preparatory object gives firmer evidence. Jegher, like Vorsterman and Pontius, was a maker with a specific technique, not an anonymous mechanical operator carrying out a painter's wishes.

How to read a print credit

A print catalogue can list several names in a short line. “Engraved by Lucas Vorsterman I” identifies the maker who cut the plate. “After Peter Paul Rubens” identifies the source composition. A draughtsman may be named for a working drawing, while a publisher may be responsible for issuing impressions. A dedicatee is someone named or honoured by an inscription and need not have drawn or financed the print. The roles should be read separately before calling a sheet “a Rubens engraving.”

The technique is equally important. Engraving cuts lines directly into a metal plate with a burin. Etching uses acid on an exposed metal surface after marks are drawn through a ground. Woodcut prints from raised areas left on a carved block. A single design might pass through more than one stage, and a museum might catalogue a proof with etched passages and a later state completed in engraving. The Met's historical study of a Saint Catherine proof records just such a complex case and presents the claim that Rubens himself etched it as a scholarly assessment. That case should not be inflated into a claim that he engraved the many prints made after his pictures.

States are another part of a print's identity. A plate can be changed after some impressions have been pulled, creating distinguishable stages. The Met's Saint Lawrence sheet is its catalogued second state of two; another impression from another state might carry different details or inscriptions. A later publisher can also use or rework a plate. The title alone does not tell us which state, date or physical sheet is in front of us. An object number and full museum credit give a more dependable route into the evidence.

What this site's collection currently contains

The checked local object directory contains 101 painted-object routes and 27 drawing routes, but no route for a printed impression. This prints guide therefore does not invent a local print directory or relabel the Prado painting above as a print. Readers can follow the verified museum links in the references for Vorsterman's, Pontius's and Jegher's impressions. The paintings guide covers the source paintings held on this site; the drawings guide covers sheets that might serve as studies or intermediates. Similar subjects across those guides are related images, not automatically the same object.

The absence of a local print-impression route is a limit of the current site, not a claim that Rubens's print project was small. The museum examples show why a future print page would require its own selected impression, maker, technique, state, date, collection number and image rights. Until such routes are researched and approved, this guide provides the context and directs readers to institutional object records. It keeps the existing page useful while protecting the clear boundary between a painting, a drawing and a print.

Where to see verified impressions

Begin with the Met's Vorsterman Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence^[6] for an engraving after a painting and a qualified assistant's preparatory drawing. Compare the Met's Pontius Assumption of the Virgin^[9] with the Getty's account of the intermediate drawing^[7] to see a painter's revisions before engraving. Then look at the Met's Jegher Garden of Love right block^[10] for a woodcut whose composition was reshaped into a two-part print. These are museum records for actual impressions, each with its own maker and object number.

A network of different specialists

The Metropolitan Museum's account of Rubens and printmaking^[1] identifies a changing group of collaborators rather than one permanent engraver. Lucas Vorsterman worked for him regularly between 1619 and 1622, translating religious and secular compositions into engravings. Paulus Pontius was especially associated with engraved portraits; the Bolswert brothers were known for prints after landscapes. In the mid-1630s Christoffel Jegher produced woodcuts after Rubens's designs. These different strengths matter because translating a face, a large religious group, a landscape and a design cut in wood presented different problems. A print's line and tonal pattern belong partly to the printmaker's judgement, even where Rubens supplied and reviewed the design.

Working drawings add another maker to some sequences. The Met says printmakers often made the drawings needed for translation, while in other cases Rubens corrected or retouched them in ink or gouache. Some preparatory drawings after his paintings have been attributed to Anthony van Dyck. The credits “after Rubens,” “drawn by Van Dyck” and “engraved by Vorsterman” can all describe different roles within one chain. They should not be compressed into a single “Rubens print” authorship field. Nor does a museum record's “after” necessarily mean a print was made centuries later: it can name the source artist of a contemporary reproductive engraving.

The Descent from the Cross on paper

The large 1620 engraving of the Descent from the Cross^[2] provides a concrete case. The British Museum credits Vorsterman as printmaker and publisher, with the design after Rubens. It gives the print's dimensions as approximately 58.2 × 43.5 centimetres and identifies its source as the central panel of Rubens's Antwerp Cathedral triptych. That centre was one part of a larger altar ensemble, with narrative wings and a closed exterior. The engraving made its lowering scene portable and reproducible, while omitting the painted colours and the changing triptych display. It is both a witness to the composition and an independent paper object.

The museum notes a modello for the engraving in the Louvre. The Louvre's record^[3] calls its sheet a copy after Rubens made for Vorsterman and describes pricking for transfer. The wording is significant. It identifies a working stage without converting that sheet into an autograph preparatory drawing by Rubens for the original altarpiece. The likely order is not simply “Rubens painted; Vorsterman engraved”: a drawing had to mediate between the huge painted panel and the copper plate. The print then created another work with its own publisher, paper, plate states and later impressions.

Protection, circulation and later copies

Rubens took active interest in how prints circulated. A Metropolitan Museum Bulletin study of his print activity^[11] discusses privileges sought to protect reproductions and quotes his correspondence about the difficult relationship with Vorsterman. The same study recounts a 1635 dispute in France over a copyist's use of a print privilege. These records show that a print was a commercial and legal product, not merely a neutral shadow of a painting. An impression's inscription, state and publisher can therefore matter when judging when and where it was issued.

Rubens's own memory could be imperfect. In the 1635 correspondence described by the Met Bulletin he referred to being in England in 1631 while making an argument about an engraving; the study notes that he was actually in Antwerp then. A first-person document is valuable evidence of his involvement, including his statement that he retouched prints, but its incidental dates still require checking against his movements. The episode is a reminder to read letters as historical documents rather than as error-free captions.

The British Museum's later Tribute Money impression^[5] shows why identifying the exact sheet matters. It describes an engraving after Vorsterman's engraving after Rubens, in reverse and with differences, published by Cornelis Visscher. A viewer could encounter Rubens's composition through multiple reproductive steps without seeing a print Rubens supervised. A museum's layered credit records those steps. The same principle applies to later copies of the Descent: resemblance of subject is a reason to investigate the chain of making, not proof of direct contact with the Antwerp painting.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rubens and Van Dyck works on paper and print collaborators. View source
2. British Museum, Vorsterman's 1620 Descent from the Cross engraving. View source
3. Louvre, drawing for Vorsterman's Descent engraving. View source
4. Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, study of Rubens's print activity and privileges. View source
5. British Museum, later Tribute Money engraving after Vorsterman after Rubens. View source
6. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lucas Vorsterman I, Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence , 51.501.7125. View source
7. J. Paul Getty Museum, Rubens and His Printmakers. View source
8. Michiel Plomp, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rubens and Van Dyck: Works on Paper. View source
9. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paulus Pontius, Assumption of the Virgin , 51.501.7324. View source
10. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Christoffel Jegher, The Garden of Love right block, 30.53.17b. View source
11. Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 1966, on Rubens and printmakers. View source
12. Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 1970, on the Saint Catherine proof. View source
13. Museo del Prado, The Three Graces , P001670. View source

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