Peter Paul Rubens: The Drawings

For the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), drawing was a fundamental activity. Ranging from delightful renderings of children and elegant portraits of noblemen and women to vigorous animal studies and beautiful landscapes, Rubens€™s drawings are renowned for their superb quality and variety. This exquisite book presents—in beautiful full-color reproductions—more than one hundred of the finest and most representative of Rubens€™s drawings, from private and public collections around the world. Essays by Anne-Marie Logan and Michiel C. Plomp provide overviews of Rubens€™s career as a draftsman and of the dispersal of his drawings among collectors after his death. The authors discuss the various functions of Rubens€™s drawings as preparatory studies for paintings, sculpture, architecture, prints, and book illustrations. The volume also includes a sampling of the artist€™s early anatomical studies and copies after antique sculpture as