Autorretrato

Rubens painted this near the end of his life, around 1638, when he was past 60 and increasingly crippled by what was then called gout, the attacks sometimes so bad he could not hold a brush. Yet he shows himself not as a painter at all, with no palette and no smock, but as a gentleman and a knight, gloved, one hand resting on his sword. He had in fact been knighted by two kings, and had spent years as a diplomat carrying quiet messages between the courts of Europe. The face is where the honesty lies. It is weary and a little swollen, the eyes steady but tired. He would be dead within two years, still taking commissions to the last.