If you’re an aspiring artist, you’ll know that there’s a fine line between inspiration and intimidation. Viewing an elaborately crafted masterpiece in a gallery setting might ignite your own creativity, but it could just as easily daunt you with the sheer scale of its craft. It’s easy to forget, seeing a completed work, the amount of trial and error, experimentation and practic that went into its creation - in Bruegel to Rubens: Great Flemish Drawings, that process takes centre stage, making for an exhibition that’s remarkably creatively energising in its approachability.

While Bruegel and Rubens are the gallery headliners, the exhibition comprises 120 examples of masterful draftsmanship from across the Southern Netherlands throughout the 16th and 17th century. As a result, there’s a wide array of technique and subject matter on display, from minutely detailed topographic landscapes to tenderly captured portraits to richly rendered studies of classical sculpture and architecture captured on artists’ travels across Europe. Each chamber also does a great job of putting the pieces in the context of region and craft - Antwerp’s metalwork, Brussels’ tapestry weaving etc.

Because many of the pieces in the gallery were done for practice or love of the craft rather than with a patron in mind, there’s a refreshing lack of pomp or pretension about the whole display. Jan Bruegel’s Hilly Landscape is achingly beautiful in its minimalism, while works like Jacques Jordaens Klappelen: (Five Women Chatting) or David Teniers II Peasants Dancing were rendered in situ, quickly capturing a fleeting moment in a way that feels deeply candid. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention possibly my favourite piece in the whole exhibition, An Earthworm, a piece by an anonymous South Nederlands artist that proves all God’s creatures deserve to be lovingly rendered.

And as an illustrator myself, it’s inspiring to see the act of practice given prominence. Artists like Bruegel and Rubens didn’t spring out as fully-formed artists like Athena from the head of Zeus - they played around, experimented, and copied from other styles to find their own. It’s fascinating, for instance, to see how even as a 13 year old copying studies of Holbein into his sketchbook, Rubens has already begun to incorporate the more fluid and realistic drapery and anatomy for which he would later be lauded. Real care and attention is paid to the material reality of the artist’s craft - the sketchbooks of Pieter Verbruggen, alongside the tools artists of his era would likely have used, are given as much prominence as the drawings that would emerge from them, and an adjoining case displays an assortment of the kinds of artefacts an artist might use both for inspiration and technical reference.

The second chamber of the gallery brings that attention to the process into the context of larger, more elaborate works. Seeing the scribbled beginnings of what would become Rubens’ The Last Communion of Saint Francis of Assisi, the white-out corrections made by a teenage van Dyck to his early sketches for Christ Carrying the Cross, or the annotations made by Maerten von Vos to his concept sketch for his Cadmus and Hermione sculpture (“the left side should be above”); all of this feels like an act of communion with the artists as human beings, subject to their own visions and those of their patrons, toying and tinkering until they get it just so. The fragmentation of the artistic process has its own kind of beauty - I especially enjoyed a group of six fragments from a large-scale tapestry design, that feel somehow more evocative for the detail that’s omitted.

What’s especially gratifying about the exhibition is the sense that it’s inviting you to make an artist of yourself. You can leaf through facsimiles of the sketchbooks on display, sketch a copy of the Belvedere Torso used as a reference by Rubens in the centre of the first chamber, or watch practical videos displaying the effects that you can create with different drawing materials used during the period. There’s even - and this is a master stroke - a drawing station in the final chamber with photos from the exhibition for you to copy in the tradition of a budding Flemish artist. This interactivity really makes the work of the artists on display feel tangible, something to which you can actively respond. Great Flemish Drawings shows you the beauty of the process, then gives you the tools to pass it on - after all, how else are great artists made?