Helena Fourment in Her Wedding Dress

Rubens married Helena Fourment in December 1630. He was 53, a widower and one of the most famous men in Europe, a painter who also carried out diplomacy for the Spanish crown. She was 16, the daughter of an Antwerp silk merchant. In the ten years of life he had left he painted her again and again, and this comes near the start of that, showing her in the rich dress of the wedding itself. He gives real attention to the black silk and the gold, the lace at her collar, the pearls, the way light settles on costly cloth. Rubens had chosen a young local woman over the noblewomen he might have married, and he seems entirely content about it. Her steady, slightly wary look out toward the painter is the one part of her he does not smooth into an ideal.