Head Study of an Old Woman

For a long time this small panel was taken for a portrait of Rubens's mother, Maria Pypelinckx. The museum rejects that identification. The head is turned in a way that is unusual for a portrait, and the clothes are only sketched in, because this was never meant as a likeness of anyone in particular. It is a study head, kept in the studio and used several times for figures in paintings by Rubens and his workshop. Flemish painters of the period built up such stocks of heads painted from life, so that an old woman or a bearded saint could be placed into a large composition without a model sitting for it again. This one, painted on an oak panel less than half a metre high around 1630 to 1632, came from the collection of the Bavarian electors.