(Siegen 1577–1640 Antwerp)
Virgin and Child with Saint Anne,
oil on panel, 106 x 78 cm, framed

The present panel, which portrays the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne is an outstanding example of Peter Paul Rubens’s workshop output in the years around 1616. Other versions of the Virgin and Child, presumably after a lost Rubens prototype and related to the present composition, but without the figure of Saint Anne, are in private collections. The figure of Saint Anne in the present work is based on Rubens’s tronie of circa 1615, the Head of an Old Woman conserved in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (inv. no. 3339). The present work may well be the prime extant version of the composition, which is further documented by the existence of later works after originals produced in Rubens’s workshop, such as a tapestry recorded in 1909 in the collection of Max Joseph Schüler, Graz, Austria

The present work therefore gives a fascinating insight into Rubens’s working methods in this period and how he kept up with the intense demand for his pictures in the 1610s. Beyond Rubens’s main studio in his house on the Wapper, Rubens’s then-assistant Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) ran his own satellite workshop in the house of Dom van Ceulen. In addition to van Dyck, to whom Rubens was likely referring in a letter of 1618, when he described his ‘most gifted pupil,’ the great master’s collaborators during this time also included a young Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678). Jordaens clearly had access both to Rubens’s tronies such as the Head of an Old Woman and the masters’s studio models, and an attribution of the present panel to Jordaens working under Rubens’s supervision has been suggested.

A dendrochronological survey conducted by Ian Tyers on the Baltic oak panel reveals a creation date between circa 1605 and circa 1635.