Helena Fourment com Manto de Pele

Rubens painted his second wife, Helena Fourment, wrapped in a dark fur and almost nothing else, stepping as if straight from her bath. He had married her in 1630, when he was 53 and she was 16, and he painted her again and again in the decade that followed. Her pose here quietly borrows from ancient statues of Venus covering herself, the modest goddess, though the warmth of the flesh and the loose fur make it feel like a private thing rather than a mythology. And it was private. Rubens kept this picture in his own house and never sold it. In his will of 1640 he left it directly to Helena, naming it with the affectionate Flemish title het pelsken, the little fur. She still owned it years after his death.