Rubens's Workshop

Catalogue of the exhibition Rubens’s Workshop, held at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, from 15 October 2024 to 16 February 2025.

In past centuries most European painters worked in teams consisting of a master and a variable number of collaborators. This volume focuses on one of the most prolific and successful: the workshop run by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) in Antwerp.

It produced pictures executed entirely by him (the most highly valued by the painter himself and his contemporaries) and others in which the members of his atelier were involved in the creative process in varying degrees.

This book explains the mechanics of the master’s collaboration with his assistants and analyses the differences that make it possible to distinguish an original Rubens painting from a studio product.

Edited and written by Alejandro Vergara, Museo del Prado Senior Curator Flemish Painting and Northern Schools (to 1700). The catalogue includes conversation between painter Jacobo Alcalde Gibert and Alejandro Vergara on Rubens’s painting technique and his collaboration with his assistants.

ISBN: 978-84-8480-622-6