This drawing is pendant to another in the Morgan's collection, inv. 1957.1 Rubens made these splendidly elegant yet robust angels blowing on their trumpets as designs for relief sculptures above the main entrance of the Jesuit Church in Antwerp, now the St. Charles Borromeo Church. He added white chalk for the highlights and worked these areas with a wet brush, as though sculpting the figures to life. The resulting three-dimensionality is especially perceptible in the left knee of the angel facing right, which gives the impression of bursting out of the arch and into our space. The two drawings were separated for centuries until 1957, when the Morgan, already the owner of the one facing right, acquired its pendant. -- Exhibition Label, from "Power and Grace: Drawings by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens"
Inscribed on that part of mount underneath drawing, in graphite, "fr a little shop / at Hastings / in 1875 (visible with fiber-optic light)".
Watermark: Monogram, 4 over T or J?, between chain lines.
Richardson, Jonathan, 1665-1745, former owner.
Murray, Charles Fairfax, 1849-1919, former owner.
Morgan, J. Pierpont (John Pierpont), 1837-1913, former owner.
Tuinen, Ilona van. Power and Grace : Drawings by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens. New York : Morgan Library & Museum, 2018, no. 5 (repr.)
Collection J. Pierpont Morgan : Drawings by the Old Masters Formed by C. Fairfax Murray. London : Privately printed, 1905-1912, I, 233.
Stampfle, Felice, with the assistance of Ruth S. Kraemer and Jane Shoaf Turner. Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries and Flemish Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Pierpont Morgan Library. New York : Pierpont Morgan Library, 1991, p. 144-145, no. 308, repr.
100 Master drawings from the Morgan Library & Museum. München : Hirmer, 2008, no. 47, repr. [Achim Riether]