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FRANCE-BELGIUM-ART-AUCTION
Missing Rubens sketch goes for $1.4 mn at auction
LILLE, France, April 1, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – A lost sketch by Flemish Baroque
master Peter Paul Rubens was sold at auction on Sunday for $1.46 million (1.3
million euros) after being rediscovered due to an inheritance, French
auctioneers said.
The work which depicts Saint Margaret dressed in a red and white dress
holding a cross in her hand and crushing a dragon dates from 1620, according
to the Mercier auction house in Lille in northern France.
“This is the sketch that served as a model for one of the very large panels
destined for the ceiling of the Jesuit Church in Antwerp,” auctioneer Patrick
Deguines told AFP.
In 1620, 39 panels were commissioned from Rubens for the church which was
to become one of the largest in Flanders and “by its magnificence the
spearhead of the Catholic Church in its fight with its Protestant rival”,
according to Mercier.
“These big panels were done by the whole workshop with the help of Rubens’
students but the sketches were entirely painted by the master who refused to
sell them,” Deguines added.
The ceiling of the church, now the St Charles Borromeo Church, was
destroyed by fire in 1718.
And while 33 sketches were known of and held by museums, six had
disappeared, including this one of St Margaret until “it was recently
rediscovered as a result of an inheritance”, Deguines said.
Earlier this year, another drawing by Rubens — described as “Nude Study of
a Young Man with Raised Arms” — sold for a record $8.2 million at auction in
New York.
The previous record for a drawing from the Dutch master was set during a
2014 Christie’s sale in London, when the only known preparatory drawing from
Ruben’s “Samson and Delilah” went for 3.2 million pounds ($5.5 million).
BSS/AFP/GMR/0816 hrs