Isabella Brant as Glycera

The Roman writer Pliny tells of Pausias, a painter in the Greek city of Sicyon, who loved a girl named Glycera. She made garlands of flowers for a living, and he learned to paint flowers by copying her work, until in the end he painted her as well, sitting with a garland. Rubens told that story on a large canvas around 1612 to 1615, with the flowers by his Antwerp colleague Osias Beert, and it now hangs in the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. This smaller panel puts a real woman in Glycera's place. Its title names her as Isabella Brant, the daughter of an Antwerp city secretary, who married Rubens in 1609 and died in 1626. The panel spent the 19th century in England, and in 1874 it belonged to a clergyman in Chipping Sodbury, a market town in Gloucestershire. It came up at Sotheby's in London in 1938, and that same year the Museum of Fine Arts bought it for 26,000 dollars. The museum's catalogue now gives it to a follower of Rubens and offers no date.