Three Nymphs with a Cornucopia

The Flemish painter Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) made this oil sketch in preparation for a finished work which is today in the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. Artists often used oil sketches to make preliminary decisions about composition, colour, and lighting before moving to the final work. Here, the painter has paid differing degrees of attention to various parts of the work: the background setting has been left vague, but he paid close attention to the rendering of light on the nymphs’ bare skin.

The finished version of this sketch was one of eight pictures that Rubens presented to King Philip IV of Spain (1605-1665) on the monarch’s arrival in Madrid in 1628. It included additional details that symbolised Philip’s imperial ambitions, such as ears of corn, which would have come from Spanish-controlled Central America. The Prado picture was described in 1636 as showing Ceres, the ancient Roman goddess of harvest and fertility, and two nymphs. In the present oil sketch, however, the identification of the nymphs is less clear: Rubens had already worked out the main figure grouping, but he added details and changed some gestures later.