?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
PETER PAUL RUBENS St. Catherine.
Etching, circa 1620. 293x198 mm; 11 5/8x7 7/8 inches. Third state (of 3). Arms of Amsterdam watermark. With thread margins or trimmed on the plate mark. A superb, richly-inked, early impression of this extremely scarce etching, with traces of the foul-biting marks in the lower right corner and the delicate wiping scratches indicative of the earliest impressions (see Riggs, Cincinnati Art Museum, Six Centuries of Master Prints: Treasures from the Herbert Green French Collection, 1993, pp. 151-52).
We have found only 8 other impressions at auction in the past 30 years.
Rubens (1577-1640), possibly more than any other 17th century northern European artist, relied to a great extent on printmakers to help him publicize his images. Beginning with the engraver Lucas Vorsterman around 1620 and continuing with the woodcut printmaker Christoffel Jegher during the mid-1630s (see lot 210), Rubens engaged in a brisk business over several decades, and hundreds of different images, of having professional printmakers reproduce his paintings in both engraved and woodcut form for a wider audience. He sought and obtained a special privilege or copyright entitling him to publish these reproductive prints exclusively in the Netherlands as well as in France. This was a lucrative commercial endeavor for him and his busy studio and surely contributed to his place as one of the most famous northern artists of the 17th century.
Despite the many reproductive prints after his paintings, Rubens devoted little time to printmaking himself. Only 3 different etchings have been attributed to his own hand. St. Catherine is his most famous etching, coincidentally a print in which the artist reproduced his own work, showing the saint with her raised left foot on the wheel of her martyrdom, just as Rubens painted her in the Jesuit church in Antwerp, 1620-21. Hollstein 1.
