Workshop of Peter Paul Rubens

In 1621 a Danish physician, Otto Sperling, called on Rubens in Antwerp and was shown a large room where many young painters sat, each working on a different picture that Rubens had sketched out for them in chalk, with touches of colour here and there.

'Workshop of Rubens' is the credit for what left that room with little or none of his own brushwork. Some of it was new work on his designs, and some was repetition of compositions that had already sold well. Copies of his inventions went on being made long after his death in 1640, which is why a studio copy can be hard to date.

The Prado uses this label for a Flora framed by flowers, and the Mauritshuis in The Hague for a Venus holding back Adonis as he leaves for the hunt, a copy it dates only to the 17th century.