Portrait of Helena Fourment (1614-1673), the Artist’s Second Wife, Peter Paul Rubens (after), c. 1650 – (Peter Paul Rubens) ◄ ก่อน ต่อไป ►

ศิลปิน: Peter Paul Rubens

วันที่: 1650

ขนาด: 75 x 56 cm

เทคนิค: Oil On Panel

Helena, the eleventh and youngest child of Daniel and Clara (née Stappaert) Fourment, was baptized on 1 April 1614 in the Sint Jacobskerk, Antwerp. Her father was a successful silk and tapestry dealer, and the family became related to Rubens when the sister of Isabella Brant (d. 1626), his first wife, married a Fourment son.12 Rubens would have come into renewed contact with Daniel Fourment after his return to Antwerp from London in the spring of 1630 over the tapestry series of the Story of Achilles, the modelli for which by Rubens have been dated circa 1630, although the circumstances surrounding the series’ conception remains obscure.13 The marriage with Helena took place on 6 December of that year in the Sint Jacobskerk, some eight months after his return following an absence (not counting the inside of a week) of about one and three-quarter years. In that time Helena would have matured into a young woman, whose beauty was to be celebrated.14 In a famous letter to his friend, the well-known antiquarian Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637), of 18 December 1634 (misdated as 1635), Rubens reported that he had taken ‘…a young wife from an honest but bourgeois family … I chose one who would not blush to see me take my brushes in hand’.15 Helena bore Rubens five children; the last was born just over eight months after his death on 30 May 1640.16 As a result of her marriage, Helena became a rich, prominent and ennobled member of the Antwerp patriciate, and Rubens portrayed her as such in the full-length portrait in the Louvre, in which she steps out into the street to her waiting carriage.17 In 1644, when she was thirty years old, Helena married Jonkheer Jan Baptist van Brouchoven van Bergeyk, an ex-alderman of the city of Antwerp, who went on to have a distinguished diplomatic career in the service of the king of Spain. He was elevated to the barony of Bergeyck in 1665 and created a count in 1676, three years after the death of Helena, which took place in Brussels where the couple had lived latterly. She was buried in the Sint Jacobskerk, Antwerp, beside her first husband according to the instruction of her will of 1658. She had borne her second husband six children.18 Evidence from a letter of 9 November 1671 shows that she was, indeed, a person of influence.19 She had, of course, also twice been a fecund wife. Although there is no portrait of Helena that can be said to be documented in the strictest sense, her likeness can be established by the physiognomy (admittedly generalized) of Venus in the Prado Judgement of Paris contemporaneously identified as having her features in a letter by the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand20 and Het Pelsken as named by Rubens (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) an intimate portrayal in which she covers herself only in a fur wrap and which remained in her possession.21 Two portraits in the Munich Alte Pinakothek were among the 105 paintings acquired from Gisbert van Colen (or Ceulen, 1636-1703) in 1698 by Max-Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, as ‘2. Portraits van der Madame Rubens’.22 One of these two portraits was the prototype of the present picture, which was similarly identified when first referred to in print in 1787. Van Colen was married to a niece of Helena Fourment.23 And there can be no reason to doubt the traditional identification of these two portraits. The museum picture (which is on a composite oak support of two pieces of timber originating from the west German/Netherlandish region and available for use from 1626) has been associated with that in Munich since 1842,24 when it was believed to be preliminary to it, a theory last embraced by Norris, just over a hundred years later.25 Vlieghe recorded Burchard’s opinion that the central portion – of the face with the chest and upper part of the garment – was autograph;26 his own view was in agreement with that of Glück, published in 1920,27 that it was a copy. Glück, followed recently by Van Hout,28 praised the brushwork in the picture, and believed it to be the work of the studio, or a pupil, a view recently embraced also by the Rubenshuis Rubens in Private exhibition.29 The most recent judgement of the museum is that it emanated from Rubens’s circle; indeed, the support was available for use from 1626. But, the brushwork seems not to be reminiscent of Rubens’s studio in the last decade of his life; judging from a colour reproduction, a picture in the Palazzo Rospigliosi, Rome, recorded in an inventory of 1713, has a better claim to such a status.30 However, it is likely that the present picture was made directly after the Munich picture rather than after the copy of it in Rome. The lack of detail in the collar (for example) might indicate that the painting was made sometime after the execution of the original, when the varnish had discoloured sufficiently to obscure such detail. The provenance of the original in Munich before its sale in 1698 is not known; it may have remained in the possession of the blood descendants of t../..