The Garden of Love (left block)

Christoffel Jegher

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Having realized the potential profits to be made from reproductive prints of his work, Rubens began to engage printmakers from 1619 onward. In the early 1630s, he turned to woodcuts in close collaboration with Christoffel Jegher. Indeed, Jegher's place in art history as the most important woodcutter of his time rests exclusively on the nine large single-page woodcuts that resulted from this collaboration. The Garden of Love is a variation of a picture by Rubens from the 1630s (Museo del Prado, Madrid). Two drawings by Rubens (finished by Jegher; see 58.96.1,.2) served as models. The woodcuts reproduce these drawings in reverse. The drawings, and consequently the prints, transform the composition of the painting into a frieze, most notably by dividing it into two separate parts, pushing the figures to the foreground and cropping the architecture at the top. The inherent nature of the coarse woodcut medium and the effect that could be achieved with it were fully exploited, particularly in the rendering of the human form.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art