The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford has set itself something of a challenge with its latest exhibition, but rises to it magnificently. Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings draws on the museum’s own spectacular Old Masters collection, which are usually housed in the relatively humble Western Art Print Room. This is the first time it has honoured its pieces with a show of their own, to which it has added works on loan from Flanders, the Bodleian, and the Christ Church Picture Gallery.
The last major installation at the Ashmolean, which I went to see in November, was all about colour. In contrast, this one is mainly in black and white and shades of grey; it is made up almost entirely of drawings. As the curator, An van Camp, notes in her introduction to the catalogue, drawing “is indeed the first thing that an aspiring artist is taught, and it is likely that most of the other artworks created throughout an artist’s career will start with a sketch on paper”.
Not only that, but drawing is inclusive in the sense that almost everyone does it in one way or another. Dr van Camp, who is the Ashmolean’s Assistant Keeper of Northern European Art, calls them “perhaps the most accessible art form”. She notes that “everyone has drawn at one point in their life, be it a subconscious doodle while on the telephone, a sketch for a school art project, as part of a hobby, or even in a professional capacity.” Not everyone does it in quite the way the artists in this pantheon of talent did it, however.
The pieces are laid out in a way that not only showcases them as works in their own right, but also unpacks them in ways that allow visitors – especially ones with a less-than-expert grasp of the world and culture of the Southern Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – to come away with a sense of motivation and inspiration, the context of commissions, and the practical ways of working. A cabinet containing artists’ tools and paper presents the blank canvas with which each item began.
The pictures on display here served a variety of functions. Some were preparatory sketches for a larger, painted work; others were handed onto artisans in different fields for the creation of stained-glass windows or woven tapestries. Some served as practice pieces, part of an artist’s personal sketchbook – visitors are encouraged to handle and flick through a high-quality facsimile of one of the younger Pieter Verbruggen’s, from the late seventeeth century – or became completed pieces in their own right.
All the draughtsmanship is of breath-taking quality and achievement. Of over 100 works on display it’s hard to select favourites, but it’s also worth reflecting that the quirks of history which divided the Netherlands into Catholic and Protestant territories produced open sectarianism. As such religious art became profoundly confessional; an anonymous Design for an Altarpiece early on has barley-sugar columns like Bernini’s in St Peter’s Basilica, and all the drawn sightlines radiate out from a monstrance at its centre.
Devotional works loom large; but then so do less-spiritual pieces. Antony van Dyck’s austere Christ and the Adulterous Woman, sent from the Museum Plaintin-Moretus, is his sketch-copy of Titian’s unfinished original in Venice – anticipating van Dyck’s later obsession with Titian’s use of palette and narrative. Nearby is Peter Paul Rubens’s Anatomical Study of the Legs of Man, with the curators helpfully drawing attention to “these muscular legs and firm buttocks”; his drawing of the famous Belvedere Torso also features.
An element of sensuality trails through the entire exhibition – inevitably, maybe, given the focus on the human anatomy – which regularly bleeds into the more pious works. An accomplished sketch for a statue of Our Lady of Sorrows, attributed to Lucas Faydherbe and probably the one in St James’s Church in Antwerp, appears next to a pair of enormous thighs and calves pointing in the opposite direction. It gives a very human insight the realities of artistic life: lofty ideals combined with the need to save paper.
Elsewhere a Sacrifice to Priapus, by Lambert Lombard is described as “an incredibly erotic scene”, which is something of an understatement. In fact, the curatorial notes are a delight: deadpan and full of laconic restraint. “Lombard revised his original design and covered up Priapus’s phallus with a small piece of paper, after which he redrew the image.” Pieter van der Heyden redrew it slightly later; he did the same to the Temptation of St Antony by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, both versions of which also appear.
This stark contrast between Priapism and piety underlines the sheer versatility of the artists behind the show; they all had to eat and turned their skills towards whoever provided the next commission, which was very often the Church. Acumen also played its part: a sketch by Bruges-born Jan van der Straet is a copy of an altarpiece he painted in Florence – he lived most of his life in Italy, where he was known as Giovanni Stradano – but done back-to-front for a print run in Antwerp. Cross-border Catholicism meant multiple markets.
Religious themes abound, pregnant with later-realised potential: an Annunciation by Denys Calvaert; The Martyrdom of St Apollonia by Jacques Jordaens (a rare watercolour piece); a Lamentation over the Dead Christ into which Abraham van Diepenbeeck intruded a Dominican friar, presumably at the instruction of his patron; St Barbara and St Clare of Assisi, ghostly precursors done by Rubens in preparation for his enormous ceiling scheme for the Jesuits at St Ignatius’s in Antwerp, all of which was lost to a fire in 1718.
There are more homely corners, too. Five Women Chatting was drawn quickly by Jordaens from his own window in Antwerp on 1 October 1659 – he made a point of noting the date. At the other end of the social scale, the great collector Thomas Arundel appears, done by Rubens; so does Prince James (sketched by van Dyck ready for his famous Children of Charles I, with their enormous dog) who would later be England’s last de jure Catholic king. An endearing Earthworm is anonymous and undated.
The subjects seem inexhaustible, and include fantasy as well. I wish my bathroom had towel rails designed by Paul Vredeman de Vries. It’s impossible not to come away impressed by the detail and care that went into the pieces presented, especially when most of them were only done as rough ideas (all things being relative) of far greater works to be realised in the future – or not, as the case may be. Splashes of colour, such as in the tapestry cartoons in the last room, do not detract from the monochrome lines of the rest.
If I had to choose a favourite, it would have to be Jordaen’s The Bean King, almost the last picture in the show. At Epiphany an old man celebrates with his family, having found the all-important bean in his slice of galette de rois; they are all singing and raising glasses in a scene of benevolent and libidinous chaos. Joyous energy seems to leak out of the frame, but, once again, the last word goes to the curators: “The figure of a mother wiping her baby’s bum is a later revision.”
Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings is at the Ashmolean Museum until 23 June
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