Portrait de Nicolaas Rubens

This is a father painting his son. Nicolaas Rubens was the younger boy from Peter Paul Rubens's first marriage, to Isabella Brant, and by the mid-1630s he had grown into the young man we see here, caught in three-quarter profile on a small oak panel. Rubens was by then about the most successful painter in Europe, running a large Antwerp workshop and carrying diplomatic missions between courts, yet work like this was private. His children turn up again and again in his late drawings and oil sketches, done for himself rather than for a patron. The handling here is quick and direct, the kind of intimate study a busy man makes of his own family in an odd free hour.