Peter Paul Rubens: The Drawings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A magnificent selection of drawings by one of the greatest artists of the seventeenth century, 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, Rubenss 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 Rubenss drawings, from private and public collections around the world. Essays by Anne-Marie Logan and Michiel C. Plomp provide overviews of Rubenss career as a draftsman and of the dispersal of his drawings among collectors after his death. The authors discuss the various functions of Rubenss drawings as preparatory studies for paintings, sculpture, architecture, prints, and book illustrations. The volume also includes a sampling of the artists early anatomical studies and copies after antique sculpture as well as several sheets by other artists that Rubens retouched, restored, or reworked.