Rubens and his Landscape Drawing : Sketching En Plein Air

Fascinating online lecture from the Wallace Collection speculating on why Rubens did sketches out of doors at various points in his career.

An Van Camp from the Ashmolean Museum gave us a brief overview of his career and when the sketches fist started to appear. The early works from around 1615 seem to have recorded images which were later reused in paintings. They also seem to have been kept in the studio and reused in later pictures so were they just drawn a tools for the studio?

When he moved to Het Steen in 1635 he seems to have started drawing for pleasure and moved to working on large sheets of rough paper. He also seems to have annotated some with nature and optic observations. She also talked about the role of his watercolour sketches which may have been more compositional works rather than recording specific details and also about research into his handwriting in the annotation and how if is different in different medium and also in later life.

 

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