Helena Fourment with a Carriage

Rubens married Helena Fourment in 1630, when she was 16 and he was 53 and long a widower. He painted her again and again through his last decade, as a wife and as a model, and this is probably the last portrait of her he made, around 1639, a year before he died. She steps out from their grand Antwerp house toward a waiting carriage, followed by their small son Frans, who was born in 1633. Rubens sets the viewpoint low, so she rises above us, unhurried and stately in dark silk. His hands were by now often crippled by gout, and yet the brushwork here stays quick and sure.