Image source: wikiart.org
Introduction
“Nicolas Rubens” (1619) is among Peter Paul Rubens’s tenderest survivals: a close, unguarded drawing of his younger son, observed at the age when cheeks are round, lashes are long, and attention drifts like light across a wall. Executed in the supple duet of black and red chalk, the sheet turns a father’s gaze into art, balancing precise structure with breathed color to fix a mood that would otherwise slip away. Where Rubens’s large canvases marshal armies of figures and grand allegories, this small likeness compresses his virtuosity into a few concentrated means, proving that intimacy can carry as much artistic weight as spectacle.
The Medium: Black and Red Chalk in Concert
Rubens builds the head with black chalk for bones and boundaries and red chalk for warmth and circulation. The black sets the scaffolding—the contour of the skull, the curve of eyelid and nostril, the gentle torque of chin and neck—then relaxes into soft hatching that fogs into tone across the cheek and temple. The red is laid as an atmosphere rather than a mask, blooming at the lips, ear, and cheek like blood near the surface. Paper tone supplies a middle register so that highlights need not be added; they happen wherever the sheet is left unmoved. The method is economical but rich, producing the sensation that the drawing is not merely seen but breathed.
A Face Lowered in Thought
Unlike the strict classical profile chosen for his elder son Albert, Rubens lowers Nicolas’s head and turns it slightly, catching a hush of self-absorption. The downcast eye, heavy with childhood’s luxurious lashes, pulls attention inward; the small mouth gathers itself as if to test a word or study a toy. Everything about the pose protects the child from performative display. The likeness is not a presentation for a patron; it is a moment of privacy recorded by someone allowed to be close.
Modeling Flesh Without Paint
Rubens’s oil portraits glow with layered glazes, but here he conjures flesh with nothing more than feathered strokes and powdered earth. The cheek swells in a broad, pearly plane before sliding into the shaded undercurve near the mouth; the bridge of the nose rises from the face with barely a seam; the eyelid’s paper-thin fold is traced with a short, confident stroke that gives the eye its damp, living weight. These passages show a painter thinking in volumes even when deprived of paint. The drawing feels tactile because the modeling follows the logic of touch.
The Hair: Lines That Curl Like Breath
The hair has the unruly life of a child’s crown after play. Rubens maps the mass with buoyant loops, then graces the surface with finer strokes that catch at the light. There is no repetitive pattern; waves break and reform as they would on a breezy day, with darker accents at the nape where strands compress against the neck. A few warm red chalk lines streak the locks, not to color them auburn but to bind the head’s temperature to its halo. Hair and cheek belong to the same living system.
The Coral Necklace and Early Modern Belief
Around the neck lies a small string of coral beads, an object whose meaning an early seventeenth-century viewer would instantly recognize. Coral was worn by infants as a protective amulet against illness and evil, a fusion of medicine, superstition, and fashion. Rubens notes it without pomp: a tight ring of rounded shapes, some beads darker where they pass into shadow, one slightly flattened by pressure against the soft fold of skin. The necklace does more than identify an age; it enfolds the portrait in parental care, aligning the sheet with the daily rituals of a household that knew both the fragility and the joy of infancy.
The Ethics of Looking
Rubens’s art is famous for appetite—for bodies that live in the key of abundance. Here appetite becomes attention. The artist avoids grown-up mannerisms or borrowed allegories. He does not dress the child as Cupid or Saint John; he does not add a column or a curtain to drag the drawing toward rhetoric. Instead he watches. The page makes a case for an ethics of looking in which love is measured by accuracy. To honor a child is to see what is actually there: the wary mouth, the slightly chafed ear, the hair that cannot be convinced to lie down.
Family, Workshop, and the Domestic Studio
By 1619, Rubens presided over Antwerp’s most dynamic studio while also building a family with Isabella Brant. Sheets like this reveal how permeable those worlds could be. The same hands that guided assistants through giant altarpieces took a mid-day interval to track the minute curve of an infant’s lip. The drawing likely lived among other studies—hands, horses, draperies—ready to be consulted later when angelic heads were needed for a Madonna or a celestial chorus. Domestic affection becomes artistic capital without being reduced to it.
Comparisons with the Portrait of Albert Rubens
Set beside the near-contemporary drawing of Albert, this sheet exposes Rubens’s flexibility. Albert receives the antique clarity of profile, a mode suited to a child old enough to pose and to a father alert to character emerging. Nicolas is handled with more vapor and inwardness: a lowered angle, a softer insistence on bone, a heavier investment in red chalk’s warmth. The pair forms a diptych in the language of growth—outwardness and inwardness, line and bloom, coinlike definition and cloudlike tenderness.
Paper as a Space for Air
One of the sheet’s great pleasures is the air around the head. Rubens refuses to crowd the child with a dark background or a tight contour. Lines thin and lift as they meet the edges so that the head seems to exhale into the blank field. The effect is not emptiness but atmosphere. Viewers sense the small weather that attends a child at rest—the faint warmth at the ear, the cool at the crown, the slight damp where breath touches lip.
Signs of Handling and the Object’s Life
Smudges at the margins, light abrasions, and the artist’s inscribed initials testify to the drawing’s use and affection. One can imagine it being taken up, shown, returned to a portfolio, consulted as a model for a cherub’s head, admired again years later when the sitter had outgrown the amulet. The paper bears not only image but history, participating in the family’s passage through time.
Theological and Allegorical Overtones Without Program
Although this is not an allegory, early modern viewers trained to read symbols would have perceived resonances. Coral, the color of blood, subtly prefigures protection through sacrifice; the downward gaze evokes humility and contemplation; the fragile neck and soft mouth echo the vulnerability that Christian art associates with the Christ Child. Rubens, who knew how to orchestrate iconography, lets such associations float without freezing the drawing into doctrine. The result is a likeness that keeps its privacy while remaining hospitable to devotion.
The Discipline of Restraint
A master of lavish color and crowded compositions, Rubens here demonstrates the power of restraint. He limits himself to a duo of chalks and the plain geometry of a head and neck. He leaves clothing and background essentially absent. He modulates pressure more than he multiplies strokes. That discipline makes the smallest decisions eloquent: a slightly darker notch under the lower lip, a tiny accent along the tear duct, a whisper of line to indicate the collarbone’s arc. Each mark carries more meaning because there are fewer of them.
Childhood as a Moving Target
To portray a small child is to paint a face in flux. Features drift while one watches. Rubens solves the problem by seeking not the generic signs of infancy but the particular balance of his son’s head at a specific hour—the weight of the brow, the gentle hang of the lower lip, the way hair masses forward at the temple. That specific truth travels better through time than cuteness would. We recognize the child as an individual first, an emblem only second.
Drawing as a Laboratory for Feeling
The sheet documents a technical lesson, but it also records a lesson in feeling. In the soft spread of red across the cheek we sense warmth; in the turned-down eye we feel the hush after play; in the coral necklace we read parental vigilance. These sensations are not imported; they arise from the same marks that build anatomy. Rubens understands that the most persuasive emotions in art are carried by form itself, not by added gestures.
A Dialogue with the Viewer
Because the child looks down, the viewer leans in. This choreography constructs intimacy. We do not stand back as we might before an official portrait; we share a visual distance appropriate to nursing, storytelling, or whispered consolation. That proximity is the proper scale for the medium and subject. The drawing offers not a performance but a visit.
Afterlives: From Nursery to Altarpiece
Nicolas would appear again, indirectly, as one of the many angelic types in Rubens’s mature works. The soft mouth and sloped eyelid recur in putti who carry garlands or play instruments in altarpieces and mythologies. Knowing this sheet changes how those crowds read: they cease to be anonymous sweetness and become, in part, a father’s memory of particular children. Studio practice and family life intertwine in ways a modern viewer can still feel.
How to Look Slowly
Enter through the glimmer at the inner corner of the lowered eye; trace the curve of the eyelid to the shadow under the lashes; cross the small bridge of nose to the plane of the cheek where red blurs into paper; pause at the slightly moist lower lip, then descend to the necklace’s gentle rhythm as beads alternate light and dark. Climb back up along the nape where hair compresses, then let your gaze surf the loose waves to the crown, where a few lifted strokes dissolve into air. This slow circuit teaches the drawing’s grammar: structure, warmth, breath, and release.
Why This Small Sheet Matters
“Nicolas Rubens” matters because it reminds us what underwrites the splendor of Baroque painting: the capacity to see closely. The same hand that could marshal cavalry and clouds first attends to the architecture of a child’s eyelid. The discipline of such looking—patient, affectionate, exact—makes the great canvases believable. In this drawing one can study the source of that believability at its most direct.
Conclusion
Rubens’s likeness of his son Nicolas is a meditation on nearness made with a minimum of means and a maximum of understanding. Black chalk lays the form; red chalk warms it; paper holds the breath between them. The coral necklace places the child within a web of care and belief; the downcast eye and receptive mouth capture a mood that any parent will recognize. Nothing in the sheet is theatrical, and yet the effect is quietly dramatic: a life seen and kept. Four centuries later, the drawing still feels immediate because it converts parental attention into the universal language of line and tone.