Panoramic Ambitions: Collecting Rubens’s Oeuvre in Reproduction, 1877–1927

Abstract

The art historical congress organised for the 1877 Rubens Year in Antwerp led to the establishment of a committee to collect Rubens’s works through engraved and photographic reproductions (1880–1910). Arguing that the art historical notion of oeuvre originated from the increasing reproducibility of works of art, this article contextualises the Committee’s collection and the fifty-year history of its public display. It does so to reveal the changing perception of graphic and photographic reproductions between the end of the nineteenth century and the interwar period. Whereas the two technologies were originally used interchangeably to obtain a comprehensive picture of Rubens’s oeuvre, they were eventually understood to fulfil separate functions; the first artistic, the second documentary. As a consequence, the Antwerp collection of Rubens’s oeuvre became dispersed.