Great Flemish Drawings at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford

On Tuesday 7 May 2024, CODART organized an online CODARTfocus meeting, in cooperation with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, dedicated to the exhibition Bruegel to Rubens. Great Flemish Drawings, which is on view at the Ashmolean until 23 June. With this online meeting CODART offered its members an insight into the artworks on view, as well as an opportunity to hear more about the making of the exhibition by curator An Van Camp of the Ashmolean and also by Virginie D’haene, curator at Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, the previous venue of the show.

The edited recording of the meeting is available below, and includes a pre-recorded ten-minute tour of the exhibition beginning at 2:27.

About the exhibition

The exhibition in Oxford presents almost 120 drawings from many of the great South Netherlandish masters of the 16th and 17th-century such as Pieter Bruegel, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Jacques Jordaens and many others. 30 of these drawings will be on display for the first time, including some which have only recently been discovered. These artworks, the majority of which have been selected from the collection of the Ashmolean and the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, provide insights into how and why artists in the Southern Netherlands used drawing in their workshop practice and beyond.

Bruegel to Rubens. Great Flemish Drawings is on view at the Ashmolean from 23 March until 23 June 2024.  The exhibition at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, which was titled From Scribble to Cartoon: Drawings from Bruegel to Rubens, was open from 17 November 2023 until 18 February 2024.