Portrait of Jan Brant

By 1635 Rubens was at the height of his fame and had just bought a country estate outside Antwerp. The man he painted here was closer to home. This is Jan Brant, the humanist lawyer whose daughter Isabella had been Rubens's first wife until her death nine years before. Brant was in his mid-seventies now, near the end of a scholarly life that had taken him to study law in Leuven, Orléans and Bourges before he settled in Antwerp. Look at the book beside him. The inscription on its spine points to a commentary he had published on an edition of Caesar, the work that made his name. Brant left this portrait to his grandson Albert Rubens, who went into the law just as he had.