Portrait of Isabella Brant

Isabella Brant married Rubens in 1609, when she was 18, and for the next 17 years she was his wife and, now and then, his model. He painted her here around 1625, warm-eyed and faintly smiling, in an embroidered bodice and a wide lace collar. Within a year she was gone. Plague ran through Antwerp in 1626 and took her at 34. Rubens, usually so measured in his letters, wrote that he had lost an excellent companion, one he could love because she had none of the faults of her sex, and that he felt the loss deeply. He married again a few years later, a young woman of 16, though this face belongs to the first marriage, painted while she was still well.