CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

Peter Black embarking on research campaign concerning the head study in Rubens’s studio practice, 1602-1638

Peter Paul Rubens, Head of bearded man in profile, ca. 1618-21, Glasgow, Hunterian Art Gallery

Peter Paul Rubens, Head of bearded man in profile, ca. 1618-21, Glasgow, Hunterian Art Gallery


Peter Black holds a Getty Curatorial Research Grant for May 2006, during which he will be preparing an exhibition proposal for a show about Rubens’s studio practice in the use of head studies. He intends to travel to Copenhagen, Brussels, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Potsdam and Dresden to research individual works.

The research questions on which he will concentrate are: the extent of Rubens’s "gallery of character studies," the dating of known panels, Rubens’s Italian sources including the relationship with spolvero drawings of heads. The research grew out of work on the attribution of the Hunterian’s study head of a bearded man, and into the function of a recently-acquired fragment of a sheet of study heads (reproduced). Peter Black would be very grateful for contacts with others interested in this field.