Rubens drawing fetches $8.2 mn at controversial auction

A drawing by Flemish Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens sold for $8.2 million in an auction in New York on Wednesday that was criticized by some in the Netherlands who said the work should have been offered to a Dutch museum. Sotheby’s described the small, rectangular “Nude Study of a Young Man with Raised Arms” as a key piece in the development of one of the artist’s pivotal commissions, and one of only a handful of drawings of comparable importance by Rubens to have come on the market in the last half century. Depicting a muscular, nearly nude young man who strains as he pushes an unseen weight above his head, the drawing was used in the preparation of Ruben’s famous “Raising of the Cross” triptych, painted in 1610. It was acquired by the Dutch royal family in 1838 by Prince William of Orange, who became the Netherlands’s King William II.