Anne-Marie Logan Rubens’s drawings after Julius Held Among the many significant contributions Julius Held made to the field of art history are his publications on Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). His name will always be associated with the connoisseurship of Rubens’s work, whose oeuvre he has studied more extensively and deeply than few before him. Julius Held was not only familiar with the master’s work but with that of many of his contemporaries, pupils or followers, a prerequisite for sorting out the various artists in the so-called Rubens school and Flemish art in general. Not many present-day scholars, moreover, match Held’s thorough knowledge of the classical sources and his fluency in Latin, not to mention his great gift of reason leading to clear, convincing arguments. Julius Held’s catalogue of Rubens’s oil sketches published in two weighty volumes in 1980 and now out of print, is a model for any catalogue raisonné. 2004, a Rubens year in disguise, proved once more how significant Julius Held’s publications on the work of Peter Paul Rubens were, and how his judgments have held up so very well over the years that span now half a century.1 Much of his groundbreaking work on Rubens as a draftsman (1959 and 1986)2 and the oil sketches of Peter Paul Rubens (1980)3 have remained the standard references for any research on the Flemish artist. Held’s opinions were referred to time and again in the many publications that accompanied the more than twenty Rubens exhibitions beginning in late 2001-2002 and ending only four years later, with another one opening in September 2007 in Brussels. His publications on Rubens’s work that began in the 1940s initiated a growing interest not only in the artist but also in Flemish art in general. The many specialized monographs or exhibition catalogues on Rubens and some of his contemporaries are vivid proof. Within the last two decades we witnessed publications not only on the well-known artists like Anthony van Dyck4 or Jacob Jordaens5 but also on lesser known Flemish artists.6 For many of them Julius Held contributed individual articles, spanning back to the 1930s.7 More information has also been found on one of Rubens’s few known pupils, Willem Panneels.8 Moreover, Hans Vlieghe’s Flemish Art and Architecture 1585-1700 that appeared in 19989 gives an excellent survey of the art of the principal artists, sculptors and architects of the region and serves as a point of reference for the many volumes in the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard series, sponsored by the Rubenianum (Centrum voor de Vlaamse Kunst van de 16de en de 17de eeuw) in Antwerp. Begun in 1968 the Corpus will eventually publish Rubens’s entire oeuvre. Recent catalogues of collections with significant holdings of Flemish seventeenth-century paintings have made many works more accessible, among them Braunschweig,10 the Prado, Madrid,11 Munich,12 Neuburg,13 the Liechtenstein collection, Vienna,14 and the National Gallery of Art, Washington.15 These publications often include very good color reproductions that enhance our image of Rubens, his contemporaries and followers. More and more museums also post their holdings online. Noteworthy, furthermore are recent catalogues of Flemish seventeenth-century drawings, namely in the Pierpont Morgan Library and Museum, New York (1991),16 at Windsor Castle (1994),17 and at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2001).18 More recently a number of articles appeared on the drawings Rubens collected, their classification for easy 160 Oud Holland Jaargang/Volume 120 - 2007 Nr. 3/4 retrieval, on the artist’s inscriptions on his drawings, and on the collecting of Rubens’s drawings.19 These many publications are living proof that Julius Held’s early interest in Rubens and Flemish seventeenth-century art in general has now mushroomed into a lively field and the work of Rubens himself has turned into a growth industry. My contribution concerns above all Julius Held’s fundamental study on Rubens as a draftsman and how it still plays a vital role in this rather specialized field; at the same time it aims at updating the knowledge and publications on Rubens and Flemish artists around him. The brief overview also discusses what is still “in”, what “out” in my opinion, especially in view of the numerous exhibitions dedicated to Rubens’s oeuvre during 2004-2006, as listed in Appendix II. Konrad Renger summarized the result of these many events celebrating Rubens in an excellent, in-depth review in Kunstchronik that appeared in early 2007.20 Held’s statement in his revised edition of the Selected Drawings that his introduction “still remains the only study available analyzing Rubens’s drawings technically, functionally and stylistically, besides dealing with the tricky problem of connoisseurship”21 is to a large extent true, although an effort at updating it to some degree has been made in the recent exhibition Peter Paul Rubens: The Drawings, organized jointly by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Albertina, Vienna.22 The same can be said of Held’s critical catalogue of P.P. Rubens. The Oil Sketches that formed the basis for the first recent exhibition dedicated to the subject, Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens, shown in Greenwich, Connecticut, Berkeley, California and Cincinnati, Ohio.23 In 1987 and 1992 Julius Held published several additional oil sketches that became known since the publication of his catalogue raisonné of 1980.24 Although no new Rubens oil sketches have been discovered since, some have changed owners. A memorable event was celebrated in Munich in 1997-1998, when Konrad Renger organized an exquisite small exhibition around the acquisition of the oil sketch for Munich’s famous Lion Hunt, one of Rubens’s masterpieces in the rich collection of the Alte Pinakothek,25 a painting that was restored and cleaned for the occasion. Munich received a bonus since the reverse of the same panel –now in an upright position - showed Rubens’s preliminary oil sketch for the Marriage of Marie de’ Médicis by proxy in Florence in 1600, an important scene in the Medici cycle that the artist delivered to the Luxembourg Palace, Paris in May 1625. In 1989 Michael Jaffé published for the first time a fully illustrated catalogue of all of Rubens’s paintings and oil sketches in Rubens. Catalogo completo.26 This great achievement presented in one volume and in Italian appeared exactly a century after Max Rooses’ five-volume catalogue of Rubens’s oeuvre of 1886-1892 (see below). Jaffé frequently also mentioned the associated drawings in his brief accompanying texts. His total for Rubens’s painted oeuvre amounts to 1403 works (very few omissions have been found since.) This renders Rudolf Oldenbourg’s Klassiker der Kunst volume of 1921, Peter Paul Rubens: Des Meisters Gemälde, the standard reference for Rubens’s paintings for generations, obsolete for the present; however, it is still needed for older sources since this was the accepted reference to the master’s paintings. Three interesting, recent discoveries of Rubens paintings have to be added to Michael Jaffé’s catalogo completo: the Deposition from the Cross (fig.1) that Rubens painted ca. 1602 for the private chapel of Eleonora Gonzaga in Mantua,27 the Battle of the Amazons of about 1603-05 in a private collection and exhibited in London in 2005,28 and the Massacre of the Innocents of ca. 1611-1612, on loan to the National Gallery, London from a private collection.29 Rubens’s painted oeuvre thus has been extensively published and exhibited. The data on the artist and his work have been expanded and updated significantly since Julius Held’s revised volume on a selection of Rubens’s drawings of 1986 and of the artist’s oil sketches of 1980. Held discussed 456 original oil sketches and 43 that he 161 Oud Holland Jaargang/Volume 120 - 2007 Nr. 3/4.