The drawing is inspired by the figures in Raphael's fresco above the entrance to the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria della Pace, Rome painted about 1511-12. The drawing does not date from Rubens' period in Italy (1600-1608); both the technique and the style recall his copy, now at Rotterdam, dating from the early 1620s, of the stucco figures by Primaticcio in the chamber of the Duchesse d'Estampes at Fontainebleau, M. Jaffé, Rubens and Italy, Oxford, 1977, pl. XIV. The pouncing in the seated figure of Baruch suggests that Rubens was working from a drawing he had made in Rome from one of the many copies he had acquired after great Italian masters. As Michael Jaffé pointed out, Rubens had copied the fresco during his Italian period in a study belonging to the late Professor J.Q. van Regteren Altena, and it may well have been this drawing which he had before him when he was drawing the present sheet. The present drawing is fairly faithful to the fresco, but characteristically Rubens has added a note of drama lacking in the original: the rather expressionless face of Raphael's Prophet is changed to an intense, fiercely concentrated gaze towards the seated Baruch. This alteration is very much in keeping with the Biblical text which states that God commanded Jeremiah to write 'all the words that I have spoken unto thee against Israel and against Judah, and against all the nations.....It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil which I purpose to do unto them; that they may return every man from his evil way; that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin' (Jeremiah 36, 2-3). Rubens also slightly adapted the composition so that it would fit the rectangular format of the drawing rather than the narrow, curved space of the original fresco. The space between the two lower figures is widened and the angel, who seems to shrink away from the words on the tablet, is placed higher in relation to Jeremiah to create a pyramidical, balanced composition.
Richardson who owned the drawing was, to judge from the number of Rubens studies (unfortunately mostly undescribed) in the posthumous sale catalogue of his collection, a great admirer of Rubens as a draughtsman. The present drawing may, however, have had a special appeal as he owned three Raphael studies for the commission: the ex-Hammer Foundation Prophets and Sibyls, The Phrygian (?) Sibyl in the Ashmolean Museum, and The Phrygian (?) Sibyl in the British Museum.
The drawing will be published in Michael Jaffé's forthcoming article Seven unpublished drawings by Rubens in the Festschrift in honour of Matthias Winner.