Rubens, His Wife Helena Fourment, and One of Their Children

Rubens painted this one for himself, not for a client, in the last years of his life. He walks his second wife, Helena Fourment, through a formal garden much like the one behind his own grand house in Antwerp. He had married her as a widower in his fifties. She was 16, some 37 years younger, and by the time of this picture they had a growing family. The child at their feet is their son Frans. There is a small thing worth noticing. Rubens reworked the canvas more than once, and the boy was added later, which is why the group can feel slightly rearranged. For a man who ran a vast workshop and served kings as a diplomat, this is the rare painting where he simply shows his own household out on a walk.