Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 199.6 cm × width 177.8 cm
Peter Paul Rubens (workshop of)
Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen as a Gardener (Noli me Tangere)
c. 1615 - 1618
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: I. Verslype / Z. Benders, RMA, 6 August 2008
- technical report: I. Verslype / E. van Zuien, RMA, 9 November 2009
Provenance
…; collection Louis Bernard Coclers (1741-1817); from whom, fl. 5,000, to the dealer Jan Spaan, The Hague, by 1808;1 from whom to Pieter de Smeth (1753-1809), Lord of Alphen and Rietveld, Amsterdam; his sale, and Vollenhoven in De Bilt near Utrecht, Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 1 August 1810 sqq., no. 83 (‘Rubbens (Petrus Paulus) In een Landschap ziet men den Zaligmaker, in de gedaante van een Hovenier, zich aan Maria Magdelena vertoonen, welke voor hem in eene eerbiedige houding nederknielt op doek hoog 78, breed 69 duimen [204 x 180.5 cm]’), fl. 2,700, to the dealer Jeronimo de Vries for Lucretia Johanna van Winter (1785-1845), Amsterdam;2 her husband, Jonkheer Hendrik Six, Lord of Hillegom (1790-1847), Amsterdam; anonymous sale [Hendrik Six], Amsterdam (J. de Vries et al.), 25 November 1851, no. 43 (‘Petrus Paulus Rubbens. Maria Magdalena voor Jezus. De uit het graf verrezen Christus wordt door Maria herkend; zij is in aanbidding aan zijne voete gezonken. […] hoog 2 el, breed 1 d 75 d. Doeck), bought in at fl. 4,950;3 his sons Jan Pieter Six (1824-99), Lord of Hillegom, and Pieter Hendrik Six (1827-1905), Lord of Vromade; from the latter’s heirs purchased by the museum with support from the Vereniging Rembrandt, 1908; on loan to the Dutch embassy, Brussels, from 1936; transferred to the DRVK, 1953; on loan to the St Lambertuskerk, Etten-Leur, near Breda, since 1982
Object number: SK-A-2336
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Peter Paul Rubens (Siegen 1577 - Antwerp 1640)
Peter Paul Rubens was born on the eve of the feast day of the saints Peter and Paul (after whom he was named) – on 28 June 1577 – in Siegen, Westphalia, the son of a Protestant lawyer Jan (1530-1588), who with his wife Maria (1538-1608) had left their native Antwerp in 1568. He died a long professed Catholic in Antwerp on 30 May 1640 after an immensely successful career as a painter, from which he amassed a fortune, and as a public servant in the service of the Archduchess Isabella, the Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and of his sovereign, her nephew, King Philip IV of Spain.
His oeuvre includes well over a thousand paintings – partly made possible by a well-organized studio – supplemented by an extensive group of drawings and of engravings after his work, the production of which he supervised. Much of his output was of religious subjects, but he also specialized in mythologies; he was an innovative landscape painter and a sympathetic portraitist especially of friends and members of his family. Four elaborate tapestry series were designed by him, and he occasionally followed the then current Antwerp practice of collaborating with other independent artists.
Rubens’s protean genius encompassed other fields: he was well versed in classical literature (like other educated men of his time) and in archaeology; he published a book on contemporary Genoese architecture and contributed to architectural design in Antwerp. An avid collector (and successful dealer) of paintings, classical sculpture, gems, and drawings by other masters, he was an expert iconographer, and a regular contributor of designs for frontispieces. Recent research has shown he was an active investor in property and a generous financier.
Three artists are later recorded as his teachers in Antwerp, where his widowed, and now Catholic mother had returned, of which the last, the learned Otto van Veen (1556-1629) was the most influential. In May 1600, two years after he had become a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke, he went to Italy, from where he returned at the end of 1608. There he had been employed as court painter to Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua (1562-1612), for whom he acted as a diplomatic courier to King Philip III of Spain (1578-1621) in 1603. Beside his study of classical and Italian art, he executed large-scale altarpieces in Rome, Mantua and Genoa.
The archducal sovereigns of the Spanish Netherlands appointed him their court painter in 1609; the following year he married Isabella Brant (1591-1626) with whom he had three children. His reputation and clientele became international; after completing the decoration (destroyed) of the aisles and galleries of the Antwerp Jesuit Church, he was commissioned by Marie de Médicis, Queen Mother of France, to paint a cycle of her life (Musée du Louvre) and that of her deceased husband (never completed) for her Luxembourg Palace in Paris. In the 1630s he painted a cycle for the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall in London (in situ) for King Charles I of Great Britain; for the city of Antwerp, he designed the decorations for the Cardinal-Infante’s Joyous Entry into Antwerp and for King Philip IV of Spain, an extensive series (chiefly Museo Nacional del Prado) for the Torre de la Parada, near Madrid. He was ennobled by Philip IV in 1624 and knighted by Charles I in 1630.
Rubens’s public service (conducted in secret early on) for the archduchess began in the early 1620s and became increasingly important. Following a visit to Madrid, he was engaged in high-level diplomatic negotiations in London in 1629-30. Having attended the exiled Dowager Queen Marie de Médicis in the southern Netherlands he largely retired from such service in 1632, two years after his second marriage to Helena Fourment, with whom he had five children.
REFERENCES
C. Ruelens and M. Rooses (eds.), Correspondance de Rubens et documents epistolaires concernant sa vie et ses oeuvres, 6 vols., Antwerp 1887-1909; M. Rooses, L’oeuvre de P.P. Rubens. Histoire et description de ses tableaux et dessins, 5 vols., Antwerp 1886-92; R.S. Magurn, The Letters of Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Cambridge 1955; Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard in 29 parts and multiple volumes of which the last are forthcoming, 1968-; M. Jaffé, Rubens. Catalogo Completo, Milan 1989; J.S. Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: A Critical Catalogue, 2 vols., Princeton 1980
Entry
The scene depicted is described only in John 20:14-17. After the burial of Christ, Mary Magdalen having found his tomb in the garden empty, mistook Christ for a gardener. Having asked him where the body of Christ had been laid, Christ called her by her name and she then recognized him as ‘Master’. But he forbade her to touch him: ‘Jesus saith unto her Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my father …’. Christ is shown as a gardener, with his hand resting on a spade, standing amidst some vegetables; beside Mary Magdalen is her emblem, the vase or alabastron. Beyond to the right, is a town intended as Jerusalem.
The one time acting director of the Koninklijk Museum, Jeronimo de Vries (1776-1853), greatly admired this picture, and it was subsequently accepted by Smith.4 But it found no favour with Rooses5 and has been considered a studio work by the museum since 1926. For editorial reasons, it and related works were not discussed by Freedberg in his Corpus Rubenianum volume dealing with the life of Christ after the Passion.
Burchard,6 and later Jaffé,7 accepted one treatment of the subject – in small, horizontal format, in the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco – as a work of collaboration between Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel I (1568-1625), though they differed as to dating. In contrast, Van Mulders in a subsequent Corpus volume has recently proposed a version in the Bremen Kunsthalle as the best extant example, dating it circa 1626-30.8
So far as concerns the treatment of the subject rendered in a large, upright format, Burchard was hesitant about the museum picture; he considered that it might be by Erasmus Quellinus II (1607-1678) and preferred a version he saw at a distance in the Jesuit Church in Brussels, which has been lost sight of since 1973.9 It is possible that this, or more likely the Bremen painting (which is probably dated too late by Van Mulders in the belief that the landscape is by Jan Brueghel II) or if not – as she also opines – a lost collaborative work by Rubens and Jan Brueghel I, is the prototype for all subsequent variations, including the present picture and also different treatments known only by engravings.10
The Rijksmuseum picture is evidently the work of more than one hand. The damaged, much retouched landscape is painted in a manner reminiscent of Jan Brueghel I, and the weakly rendered vegetables and foreground foliage recall the style of Jan Wildens (1583/84-1653). The figures of Christ and the Magdalen are clearly the work of Rubens’s studio, and it is likely that Rubens himself retouched or reworked certain areas, most notably the faces. Thus, the present work would appear to be the only extant example of a collaborative work by Rubens and Brueghel I being converted in Rubens’s studio to a life-size scale,11 in this case fitting for an altarpiece. Maybe this took place to meet a special commission.
The figure of Christ recalls the Christ in the Brussels Woman Taken in Adultery last dated circa 1615,12 while the Magdalen recalls the saint in the Munich Christ and Penitent Sinners of circa 1616/17.13 A date for the Noli me Tangere of 1615-18 would seem acceptable.
The physiognomy of Christ is similar to that in the Brussels picture and in others executed around this time. As pointed out by Meganck and Dubois, the type is that of the vera effigies as described in the apocryphal Lentulus letter. Rubens made a copy of the divine image which had been honoured by St Ignatius and which was subsequently owned by his friend Johannes Woverius.14
It is likely that the canvas support left Rubens’s studio as a rectangle, and that it was shaped by removing the top corners and a shaped section at the bottom centre to conform to Netherlandish taste for the Rococo perhaps in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.15 The mutilation seems to have been made good by the time of the De Smeth sale in 1809.
Gregory Martin, 2022
Literature
R. Priem, ‘The “Most Excellent Collection” of Lucretia Johanna van Winter: The Years 1809-22, with a Catalogue of the Works Purchased’, Simiolus 25 (1997) pp. 103-235, esp. pp. 133-34 and p. 209, no. 32; C. van Mulders, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XXVII(1): Works in Collaboration, Jan Brueghel I and II, Oostkamp 2016, pp. 95-96, no. 20, copy 2; L. Meerman, ‘An Unwritten Chapter of Dutch Collecting History: The Painting Collection of Pieter Smeth van Alphen (1753-1809)’, Simiolus 40 (2018), pp. 18-98, pp. 47, 50, 82, no. 85
Collection catalogues
1911, p. 321, no. 2066a (as Rubens); 1918, p. 412, no. 2066a (Supplement, as Rubens); 1920, p. 357, no. 2066a (as Rubens); 1926, p. 160, no. 2066 (as studio of Rubens); 1976, p. 484, no. A 2336 (as studio of Rubens)
Citation
G. Martin, 2022, 'workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen as a Gardener (Noli me Tangere), c. 1615 - 1618', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7722
(accessed 15 November 2024 06:59:51).