Two Sleeping Children

On 28 August 1611 Philip Rubens, the painter's elder brother and secretary to the city of Antwerp, died at 37. He left his wife, Maria de Moy, with two small children, Clara, born in 1610, and Philip, born in 1611. These two sleeping heads, painted on a wooden panel around 1612 or 1613, are thought to show those children. It is a study, worked quickly, with thick opaque paint for the flushed cheeks set against thinner, transparent passages in the hair and the blanket. Rubens came back to these faces later and gave them to infants and angels in larger pictures, among them a Madonna in a garland of flowers now in Munich. X-rays of the panel show that he changed his mind as he worked. The child on the left was first painted awake, looking straight out at the viewer.