EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1. Brief Description of item(s)

Peter Paul Rubens (Siegen 1577–1640 Antwerp) The Head of an African Man Wearing a Turban Oil on paper, laid down on panel, 54 x 39 cm (excluding a modern strip of paint of approximately 8 cm in width that has been added at left)

2. Context

Provenance: E. Christopher Norris, Polesden Lacey, Great Bookham, nr. Dorking, Surrey; his sale, Sotheby’s, London, 23 May 1951, lot 96 (unsold); his posthumous sale, Christie’s, London, 11 December 1987 (unsold); by descent to a private collection, England, until 2004; with Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., London;

Exhibitions: Rotterdam, Museum Boymans, Olieverfschetsen van Rubens, 1953–54, no.5 Cologne, Kunsthalle, Weltkunst aus Privatbesitz, 1968, no.F22 Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, on loan, 1989–2003 London, National Gallery, Rubens: Massacre of the Innocents, 2003–04 Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, Rubens: La Adoracíon de los Magos, 2004–2005 London, National Gallery, on loan, 2005–2006 Amsterdam, Nieuwe Kerk, Black is Beautiful: Rubens to Dumas, 2008 Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, 2012–2013, no.69

Selected literature: E. Haverkamp Begemann, exh. cat. Olieverfschetsen van Rubens, Rotterdam (Museum Boymans) 1953, no.5; C. Norris, ‘Rubens’ Adoration of the Kings of 1609’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 14 (1963), pp.133–36, fig.4; exh. cat. Weltkunst aus Privatbesitz, Cologne (Kunsthalle) 1968, no.F22; J.S. Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: A Critical Catalogue, Princeton 1980, I, no.433; II, pl.420; M. Jaffé, Rubens: Catalogo completo, Milan 1989, no.97; H. Devisscher, Peter Paul Rubens: Aanbidding der Koningen, Bloemendaal 1992, pp.68–70, fig.35; M. Diaz Padron, El Siglo de Rubens en el Museo del Prado: Catalogo Razonado de Pintura Flamenco del Siglo XVII, II, Barcelona 1995, illustrated p.867, under no.1638; D. Jaffé and A. Bradley, ‘Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents’, Apollo Magazine (June 2003), p.19, fig.21; A. Vergara et al., exh. cat. Rubens: The Adoration of the Magi, Madrid (Museo del Prado) 2004, pp.59–60, fig.4; E. Ombre et al.: exh. cat. Black is Beautiful: Rubens to Dumas, Amsterdam (Nieuwe Kerk) 2008; J. Spicer, ed.: exh. cat. Revealing the African presence in Renaissance Europe, Baltimore (Walters Art Museum) and Princeton (University Art Museum) 2012–13, pp.107–109, fig.50.

3. Waverley criteria

This painting meets Waverley criterion 2 because it is an exceptionally beautiful example of a preparatory oil sketch by Rubens, who is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important practitioners of this particular technique. It also meets Waverley criterion 3 due to its importance to the study of Rubens’s artistic practice because the sketch is on paper (rather than on panel), which is an exceedingly rare support for a Rubens oil sketch.

DETAILED CASE 1. Detailed description of item(s) if more than in Executive summary, and any

comments.

The oil sketch depicts the head of an African man wearing a turban. It is almost entirely painted in shades of brown set off by striking accents and highlights in white to denote the turban and some of the facial features, while there are some small but judiciously placed accents in bright red. The work is painted on a paper support which was previously used for a list of accounts, written in Italian. The artist turned the paper 90 degrees and prepared it with a light pink-brown ground before painting his sketch. The sketch served as preparatory to the head and turban of the African magus in Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, originally painted in 1609 and reworked by the artist twenty years later. It is an example of Rubens’s practice of preparing his works with the help of sketches, often carried out in oil on panel. Unusually, the work under consideration here is in the technique of oil on paper.

Although there are a good number of oil sketches by Rubens in British public and private collections, there are very few in the technique of oil on paper, and few that have the palpable presence of this particular example, in which the close-up features of an African man have been studied to great effect with a remarkable gusto and assuredness in the handling of the paint.

2. Detailed explanation of the outstanding significance of the item(s).

The study is preparatory to the head and turban of the African magus in Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, originally painted in 1609 (Fig.1). The painting was commissioned by the city of Antwerp to celebrate the Twelve Year’s Truce between Spain and the United Provinces and was the first public commission Rubens received after his return from Italy in 1608. In 1612 the town magistrates presented the painting as a gift to the Spanish emissary Don Rodrigo Calderón. Ten years later it was acquired by Philip IV of Spain, after Calderón’s fall from power and execution in 1621. Rubens reworked the painting and enlarged it at the top and the right edge in 1628–29, when the artist was on a diplomatic mission to Madrid. Its original appearance is recorded in a reduced replica made in Rubens’s studio (private collection). Other extant preparatory works include a modello in oil for the original composition, in the Groninger Museum (Fig.2), and a painted study for the head of the kneeling magus, in the Galleria Corsini, Rome (Fig.3), as well as two studies in black chalk related to the kneeling male nude in the foreground of the composition, respectively in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and the Musée du Louvre, Paris (Figs.4 and 5). The oil sketch under discussion here thus belongs to an impressive group of works ‘documenting’ one of Rubens’s most important and most familiar paintings. It is also among the most attractive in that group. The study may also have assisted Rubens in his imagining of

an African ruler in his famous portrait of Prince Mulay Ahmad, son of the king of Tunis, Mulay Hasan (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), although that portrait is principally derived from an early sixteenth-century etching depicting the ruler by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen.

The sketch is likely to have been painted after a live model, which makes it among the relatively rare seventeenth-century examples of a work recording the features of an African man in Europe, even if we do not know his identity. The subject-matter is also significant in the sense that the presence in a public collection of a work such as this can help enhance a sense in society of a shared heritage and can boost a commitment to serving diverse audiences.

Despite the fact that in day-to-day use paper may be considered fragile, it is in fact a durable support that, although it is for obvious reasons susceptible to water damage and tears, is otherwise especially stable when exposed to climatic changes. Oil paint on paper therefore tends to be rather beautifully preserved, with few cracks having appeared in the paint. Moreover, works in oil on paper as a category sit somewhere between oil paintings and drawings and were often protected in the same way as the latter, that is, safely stored away in an album or a box, rather than hanging on a wall and exposed to the elements and light. This too is beneficial to its preservation. Indeed, the work has survived in a good state of preservation.

The technique of oil on paper distinguishes itself from oil on panel in that it tends to have a more matte appearance because the oil paint has a tendency to dry more quickly. It thus also leaves less scope for reworking the sketch, and works in oil on paper therefore often take the immediacy of the oil sketch to the extreme; they come closest to what could be described as ‘drawing in paint’.

The head sits somewhat to the left in the picture plane. A modern addition has been added to the left, so that the head sits in a more central position. It is the image without the modern addition that concerns us here.

Between the National Gallery, the Courtauld Gallery, the Wallace Collection and Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, as well as the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, there is remarkable array of more than 30 Rubens oil sketches in the United Kingdom. But very few are in the technique of oil on paper, while not many show as direct and close-up a study of a live model as seen in this exceptional example. Rubens certainly painted other studies of heads that he subsequently used in larger compositions, as is the case here, but they are almost always on panel and rather smoother and finished in execution than the work under consideration here. None of them depict an African man. In its immediacy and assured handling of paint, Head of an African Man Wearing a Turban must count as one of Rubens’s most extraordinary oil sketches and its addition to a UK public collection would significantly strengthen the presence in this country of his oil sketches. Its permanent export would be a sad loss.

24/11/2017

1. Peter Paul Rubens, The Adoration of the Magi, 1609/1628–29. Oil on canvas, 355.5 x 493 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

2. Peter Paul Rubens, The Adoration of the Magi, c.1609. Oil on panel, 54.5 x 76.5 cm. Groninger Museum.

3. Peter Paul Rubens, Head of a Bearded Man, c.1609. Oil on Canvas, 50.8 x 41.3 cm. Galleria Corsini, Rome.

4. Peter Paul Rubens, Kneeling nude, c.1609. Black chalk heightened with white, 52 x 39 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. 5. Peter Paul Rubens, Kneeling nude, c.1609. Black chalk heightened with white, 43.2 x 54.8 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.