THE LOST RUBENS: Flemish Baroque Paintings from the Bob Jones Collection

The Museum & Gallery at Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina, in association with Townsend Art Advisory LLC, presents a traveling exhibition available for booking from 2027 through 2030.

The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to bring these important works to new audiences while the Museum is under construction.

Everyone loves a mystery. At the center of The Lost Rubens is Peter Paul Rubens’s The Dead Abel, whose extraordinary transformation from a New Testament subject, The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, into the composition seen today has been revealed through pigment analysis, x-rays and reflectography.

First recorded in 1682 in the collection of the second Duc de Richelieu in Paris, the painting reappeared at auction in London in 1739 — by then identified as Abel Slain. Shared dimensions and surviving visual evidence connect the two identities, while recent conservation and technical analysis reveal how the canvas was cut down and later enlarged into a new composition by another hand. The exhibition presents this investigation through conservation analysis and an interactive digital reconstruction, offering audiences an unusual encounter with the artistic process, conservation science and the changing life of a work of art.

Around this centerpiece, The Lost Rubens brings together a focused group of fifteen paintings — many large-scale — by Rubens and his school and works by Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, Jan Boeckhorst and others, placing the painting within the context of Rubens’s studio, influence and seventeenth-century Flemish painting. The exhibition is drawn from the Bob Jones Collection, one of the most significant collections of Old Master paintings in the United States.

The exhibition is organized by the Museum & Gallery at Bob Jones University in association with Townsend Art Advisory LLC and curated by Richard P. Townsend.

The exhibition package includes:

• 15 paintings, many large-scale, requiring approximately 90 linear feet, including text panels and labels, and a minimum gallery ceiling height of 9 feet
• An introductory text panel, several section text panels, and 15 individual labels
• An interactive digital reconstruction exploring the transformation of The Dead Abel
• A 96-page full-color hardcover catalogue with cloth-bound spine, published by Skira Editore, featuring an essay on Rubens and his studio by Prof. Nils Büttner, Chair of the Centrum Rubenianum, Antwerp, and Editor-in-Chief of the Corpus Rubenianum

Availability: Twelve-week timeslots from 2027 through 2030. February–August 2029 is reserved; all other listed timeslots are currently open.

Participation fee: $35,000 for twelve weeks, plus pro-rated shipping and insurance.

The Lost Rubens has a companion exhibition, A Guercino Rediscovered: Italian Baroque Paintings from the Bob Jones Collection, also available from mid-2027 through 2030. The exhibitions may be booked separately or together.

For full exhibition materials, availability, or to discuss a booking:
CeCe Manganaro
cece@townsendartadvisory.com
(312) 590-2715

Image + credit for exhibition 1
Jan Boeckhorst, The Adoration of the Magi, 1652. Museum & Gallery, Bob Jones University.