The first major retrospective ever to be devoted to the drawings of Peter Paul Rubens in the United States is open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and runs until April 3. “Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640): The Drawings” brings together 115 of the versatile Baroque master’s finest and most representative drawings, including dozens that have never before been on view in the United States.

Court painter, diplomat and international celebrity, Rubens was one of the most influential artists of northern Europe in the Seventeenth Century. Best known for his paintings, this universal genius is among the most imaginative of draftsmen. His topics vary from engaging biblical scenes to alluring nudes, from animated and stately portraits to poignant animal studies and from landscapes sketched from nature to complex allegories.

At the core of the exhibition is a major unprecedented loan from the Albertina – more than 30 drawings by Rubens that have left Vienna for the first time. Among them are such celebrated works as “Nicolaas Rubens Wearing a Coral Necklace,” circa 1623, studies of an “Ox,” circa 1618, and a “Saddled Horse,” circa 1615-18, and several portraits of Ruben’s immediate friends and family.

The exhibition spans Ruben’s entire career, beginning with his early training under Otto van Veen in Antwerp, where he made ingenious copies after prints of Sixteenth Century German masters like Hans Holbein and Tobias Stimmer. From 1600 to 1608, Rubens lived and worked in Italy, a mind-changing experience for the young Flemish artist. In the service of the Duke of Gonzaga in Mantua, he was allowed to travel extensively throughout the peninsula and even made a brief trip to Spain.

Rubens repeatedly copied antique sculptures to study their intrinsic beauty, and to learn about anatomy. Highly impressed by the work of Michelangelo, he copied from the Sistine ceiling extensively. Ruben’s “Libyan Sibyl,” 1601-02, after the fresco by Michelangelo, will be exhibited alongside Michelangelo’s “Studies for the Libyan Sibyl,” circa 1512.

He returned to Antwerp in 1608, and in 1609 was appointed court painter to the Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella, governors of the Southern Netherlands. In the same year he married Isabella Brant, daughter of Jan Brant, an Antwerp lawyer and humanist. In 1610 he bought a Gothic house with a large portico in Antwerp, to which he added an Italian palazzo for his studio. The house can still be seen today in the manner in which he designed it.

In the 1620s, especially, Rubens traveled extensively throughout Europe. He visited Paris repeatedly, chiefly in connection with Marie de Medicis’s order for a series of pictures for the Palais du Luxembourg, now in the Louvre. In 1628 – two years after Isabella Brant died – Rubens went to Spain for the second time, primarily on diplomatic business, but also to execute some paintings for the court at Madrid. At this time Philip IV appointed him secretary of the privy council of the Netherlands. In 1629-30 he was again on a diplomatic mission, this time in London, where he was knighted by Charles I. Back in Antwerp in 1630, he married the 16-year-old Hélène Fourment, daughter of his friend Daniel Fourment, a dealer in silks and tapestries.

From 1610 onward, until the end of his life, Rubens, together with his large studio, supplied courts and churches all over Europe with innumerable altarpieces, history cycles and portraits. While these paintings are not always by the master alone, the preparatory drawings are.

Through the drawings, it is possible to trace not only the creation of certain famous works, such as the Louvre’s “Flemish Kermesse,” circa 1635-38, for which there will be one large compositional drawing in the exhibition on loan from The British Museum, but also the artist’s own development from an ambitious Italophile, visible in the powerful studies for the early Antwerp “Raising of the Cross,” 1610-11, to a retired painter-diplomat, manifest in his leisurely yet extremely tender female portrait studies from Rotterdam, Florence and Vienna. For the latter, it seems to have been Fourment, or one of her equally beautiful sisters, who sat as his model.

“Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640): The Drawings” was organized by Michiel Plomp, associate curator, and Anne-Marie Logan, guest research curator, both of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Drawings and Prints. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog by Logan in collaboration with Plomp.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is at 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street. For information, www.MetMuseum.org or 212-535-7710.