Jesus and St John the Baptist in their Childhood
by JEGHER, Christoffel, Woodcut, 2nd state, 342 x 465 mm
This woodcut was made after a composition by Rubens.
Having realized the potential profits to be made from reproductive prints of his work, Rubens began to engage printmakers from 1619 onward. In the early 1630s, he turned to woodcuts in close collaboration with Christoffel Jegher. Indeed, Jegher’s place in art history as the most important woodcutter of his time rests exclusively on the nine large single-page woodcuts that resulted from this collaboration.