As Três Graças

Rubens painted these three nude figures in the 1630s, near the end of his life, and unlike almost everything else in his enormous output he did not paint them for a client. He made them for himself, and they were still in his house when he died. By then Rubens had married his second wife, Helena Fourment, a young woman of sixteen when the fifty-three-year-old painter wed her, and the golden-haired Grace on the left carries her face. Their soft, full bodies and warm skin are Rubens at his most frankly sensual, the three linked in a slow ring against an open landscape. After his death the king of Spain, Philip IV, bought the picture for the royal collection, which is how it came to hang in the Prado in Madrid.