Collection in the spotlight

An exceptional recent acquisition: a rare preparatory drawing of Jacques (or Jacob) Jordaens’s painting Moses and his Ethiopian Wife. The study reveals Jordaens’s creative process and highlights how modern his approach was in his time.

The library of the Rubenshuis already held 2,000 running metres of books, art files and records. With the archive of drawings specialist Anne-Marie Logan, the legacy of Rubens expert Arnout Balis, Rubens’s illustrated library, and the archive of Rubens’s country house Het Steen, four more collections have now been added to the library’s holdings. They constitute a valuable link in the further reconstruction of the life and work of Peter Paul Rubens. 

How do you move a library with 100,000 valuable reference books and documents from one building to another? What are some of the challenges? Take a look behind the scenes.