Las tres Gracias

This is not the famous, warm-fleshed Three Graces in Madrid. It is a small monochrome sketch in greys, barely larger than a sheet of paper, made by Rubens in the early 1620s. He often worked his ideas out this way first, in oil but without colour, thinking through the poses of the three embracing figures and the tumbling child above them before committing to a finished picture. Later in the century it charmed Cardinal Leopoldo de Medici, a serious collector of Rubens, and that is how a modest studio sketch ended up among the grand paintings of the Medici. It hangs in the Pitti Palace in Florence, moved to those rooms in 1928.