Retrato de Helena Fourment

Rubens painted this around 1630, the year he married Helena Fourment. He was 53, a widower and the most celebrated painter in Europe. She was the 16-year-old daughter of an Antwerp silk merchant. From that year on she becomes the figure he paints more than anyone else, more than his own face or his children. Here she stands full-length in black satin and a broad hat trimmed with an ostrich feather, the dress of Antwerp's prosperous middle class, set against a low horizon that makes her tall and monumental. For two centuries the picture hung in the Russian imperial collection at the Hermitage, until it was sold off around 1930 and came to rest in Lisbon.