Recto: a self-portrait drawing of Sir Peter Paul Rubens; head only, tilted to the left, looking out at the viewer. Verso: a summary sketch of a seated couple embracing. This is connected with a drawing of Callisto and Jupiter, from a sheet of studies in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Inscribed, verso, lower centre: 29 corrected to 27, and on the left by another hand: Mr / Pieter Bac...

Rubens sketched this remarkably rapid and assured self-portrait on a larger sheet of paper than we see today (pen traces from other studies are seen at the edges and on the reverse is a fragmentary chalk sketch of a couple embracing); the later cutting-down of the sheet makes the self-portrait appear even more intimate than the artist would have intended.

The study has been associated with a first version of the artist’s head – visible in X-ray examination – in his painted Self-Portrait with Helena Fourment and One of their Children (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The child has been identified by different scholars as each one of the four children born to Fourment prior to Rubens’s death, from Clara Johanna, born in 1632, to Peter Paul the Younger, born in 1637 (a fifth, Constantina, was born after Rubens died) and the identity of the child and the date of the painting are of course interrelated. But the X-rays of the New York painting are not conclusive; the facial features and air of noble weariness are closer to the late Self-Portrait in Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum), which shows the same sagging skin below the eyes and drooping eyelids that are so candidly sketched here. A large drawing in the Louvre prepares the pose and draperies of the Vienna portrait more precisely: if the present sheet were preparatory in any true sense for that painting, it was only as a first trial. It is perhaps more likely that this was an autonomous study, a self-meditation as the artist stared at his ageing features in a mirror and set them down on paper as economically and truthfully as he could.

Text adapted from Portrait of the Artist, London, 2016