Hercules Slaying Envy

Peter Paul Rubens, like Rembrandt van Rijn, realized printmaking’s enormous potential. Rubens was more concerned with disseminating his style and reproducing his painted compositions than with creating original subjects in print. While several artists engraved Rubens’s paintings, only one, Christoffel Jegher, cut the nine surviving woodcuts based on his work. Both Jegher’s and Rubens’s names appear, with the privilege (an early form of copyright), at the lower right of the dramatic Hercules Slaying Envy. This composition relates to a painting that Rubens was completing at the time for James I of England; its scale and broad cutting admirably reflect the artist’s florid painting style.