(Siegen 1577–1640 Antwerp)
The Conversion of Saint Paul,
oil on canvas, 89 x 113 cm, framed

Provenance:
(probably) Private collection, Belgium, since 5th January 1944 (as Jacob Jordaens);
sale, Marnix, Antwerp, 2 December 1964 (as Jacob Jordaens);
Private collection, Belgium, since 1986

Exhibited:
Antwerp, Rubenshuis, 20 March 2012 – 20 March 2017 (on loan, inv. no. RH.LBI.2012.005, as Peter Paul Rubens and Studio)

The present work is registered in the RKD database under no. 240131 (as Studio of Peter Paul Rubens).

The present canvas is a version of Peter Paul Rubens’s The Conversion of Saint Paul. The autograph composition was first identified by Justus Müller Hofstede in 1964 from a mention in the 1640 inventory of Nicolaes Rockox, the mayor of Antwerp, and dated by Müller Hofstede to circa 1602. That panel is now conserved in the collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein (72 x 103 cm, inv. no. GE40). A copy of a certificate dated 27th March 1986, attributing the present picture to Rubens by Müller Hofstede accompanies this lot, however, contemporary scholarship considers the current canvas to have been executed by Rubens’s workshop.

Rather than support Müller Hofstede’s dating of the composition to the artist’s stay in Italy – where Michelangelo’s fresco of the same subject in the Vatican was suggested to have influenced Rubens – David Jaffé instead proposes the Liechtenstein picture was executed earlier, in the late 1590s (see D. Jaffé, in: Rubens and the Birth of the Baroque, Milan 2016, p. 64). Rubens was made a master of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1598. He appears to have operated his workshop in the city up until his departure to Italy in 1600, but the identity of his assistants is not recorded. The support of the Liechtenstein picture, on oak, also points to it having been created in the North.

The present picture, with its dynamic figural arrangements, dramatic atmospheric effects and reinterpretation from several different pictorial sources is a typically exuberant challenge by the young Rubens to the Italian art he was yet to see in situ. Here the precocious young master seems to have drawn from the likes of Cornelis Cort’s 1576 engraving of the same subject (Metropolitan Museum, New York, inv. no. 56.601.349) after a design by Giulio Clovio, and as suggested by Jaffé, a circa 1579 engraving of Paul’s conversion in Peregrinationis Divi Pauli Typus Corographicus, from Abraham Ortellius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.
Of note in the current canvas are the heavily muscled back and legs of the semi-nude soldier bending over Saul in the foreground, beside the haunches of the toppled horse, with myriad over-lapping figures behind. These show some of the earliest evidence of Rubens’s ambition to express sentiment through the human body and equestrian forms. Equally the three rearing exotic camel heads behind the fallen Saul, and the overpowering celestial glow emanating from Christ above are also early expressions of Rubens ratcheting up of the emotional tension. These effects can be seen honed by Rubens in his later treatment of the same subject, also on panel (95.2 x 120.7 cm) and dated 1610-12 in the Courtauld Gallery, London (inv. no. P.1978.PG.357) along with the now lost painting of circa 1620 formerly in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin.

The present panel depicts the moment Saul, a Hellenised Jew, Roman citizen and persecutor of the early Christians is thrown from his bucking horse on the road to Damascus. Blinded by a light from the heavens, and addressed by God’s voice, Saul became a Christian taking the name Paul and was instrumental in taking Christianity to the gentiles.