Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640)
Trois Crayons Magazine, August 2026
Male écorché (flayed) figures form a small but significant component of Peter Paul Rubens’ known corpus of drawings. They are typically drawn in pen and brown ink, some are embellished with brown wash, and several are drawn in red or black chalk. It has been suggested that Rubens intended to produce an engraved publication, and further research into the area is attested by a group seven engravings after Rubens’ écorchés by Paulus Pontius, as well as a group of nineteen drawn copies by Willem Panneels at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen from the so-called “Rubens cantoor”. One of these drawings is Rubens’ original, while the other is a copy by Panneels.
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The original is the upper (left) image.
Upper (left) Image: Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), An écorché study of the legs of a male nude, with a study of the right leg, Christie’s, New York, 14 October 2021, lot 9
Lower (right) Image: Willem Panneels (1600–1634), Anatomical study of a skinned man's left leg seen from the left and his right leg in two different positions (écorché), Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, inv. KKSgb16331
As Rubens’ leading studio assistant in the late 1620s, Panneels was afforded privileged access to his master’s cantoor, the private room in Rubens’ house where he kept his drawings, oil sketches, and valuable objects. This is how he came to produce the copies of Rubens’ drawings which have come to be known as the “Rubens cantoor”. These copies provide valuable evidence for Rubens’ own collection, for his system of organisation and for many of his original works which are now lost. Alongside the close relationship to known originals by Rubens, and Panneels’ characteristic use of red and black chalk, several material characteristics help to distinguish Panneels’ copies: encrypted inscriptions in brown ink, numerical sequences, traces of coloured residue along the margins, and irregularly trimmed edges.
In the lower image, Panneels closely relied on Rubens’ original, but he also added hatching around the outlines of the figure, omitted various details in the feet and the torso, and inscribed the lower edge of the sheet in his secret code. This code has since been decrypted and translated as: ‘these legs I have also taken from the cantoor, and the outlines are good’. The clandestine nature of the code initially fueled speculation that Panneels had copied Rubens’ works without permission. Although this makes for a compelling story of subterfuge, modern scholarship has largely rejected the hypothesis, regarding Panneels’ cantoor drawings as a rare survival of the kind of personal archive that was legitimately built up by the typical workshop apprentice.
