아들 프란스와 함께 있는 엘렌 푸르망

Rubens married Helena Fourment in 1630, when she was 16 and he was 53 and one of the most celebrated painters in Europe. This is her a few years later, around 1635, holding their small son Frans, who had been born in 1633. By then Rubens had stepped back from diplomacy and the largest workshop commissions and bought a country house outside Antwerp, and he painted his young family often and tenderly. He began this as a simple half-length portrait and later enlarged it, adding strips of wood to the panel to give mother and child more room. The gold and the warm skin come from the same brush he gave to queens and goddesses, turned here on his own wife and boy.