The Drunken Bacchus,
oil on paper laid down on canvas, 58 x 77 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private collection, south Germany, since the 1980s

The present picture is a vivid ricordo of a now lost composition by Peter Paul Rubens, Drunken Bacchus Plied with Wine which is known only by repetitions such as the current work. The motif of the corpulent inebriated god, slumped over an upturned wine basket, with the scene enlivened further by the tiger below pawing up the spilt drops, is typical of Rubens’s vivacious and yet scholarly oeuvre.

The original work was recorded in Rubens’s collection at his death in 1640 as ‘Un Bacchus qui est yvre’ and several copies are listed by E. McGrath et al (see Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard XI. I, Mythological Subjects vol I, Achilles to the Graces, Turnhout 2004, pp. 266-70, under no. 18), although the present work has not been as yet identified with any therein mentioned. Most of the repetitions that have dimensions given are a roughly similar ‘cabinet’ format to the present picture, and must date from after what McGrath posits as a creation date pre-1615. She evidences this by drawing a comparison between Rubens’s compositional scheme and Jan Brueghel I’s 1615 Adam and Eve in Paradise, conserved In the Royal Collection, England, which has a similarly posed tiger and leopard ‘united in prelapsarian insouciance’, thus Rubens’s work must date from before Brueghel’s picture.