Picturing Rubens’ Oeuvre: The Photographic Impulse in the Late 19th Century

At the end of the 19th century, the city of Antwerp and the Belgian state set up a committee to collect Rubens' oeuvre in the form of photographic and engraved reproductions (1880-1910). This collection of around 600 photographs comprised 33 images by the court photographer Josef Löwy, which came from the photo campaign of the Imperial Picture Gallery in the Belvedere from 1889 to 1891 and were acquired in Vienna.

The lecture contextualises the committee's collection and the fifty-year history of its public presentation and argues that the art-historical concept of the ‘oeuvre’ arose from reproducibility. The changing perception of graphic and photographic reproduction from the end of the 19th century to the interwar period is shown.