Rubens, Helena Fourment (1614–1673), and Their Son Frans (1633–1678)

When it was painted

Around 1635, Rubens was about fifty-eight. Helena, on his arm, was about twenty-one, and little Frans was about two. This is a portrait of the second family the painter found late in life.

That family came after grief. Rubens lost his first wife, Isabella Brant, in 1626. Four years later, at fifty-three, he married sixteen-year-old Helena Fourment, the daughter of an Antwerp merchant. In a 1634 letter to his friend, the French scholar Peiresc, he explained that he had chosen a young wife from a respectable middle-class family rather than a lady of the court, someone who would not be embarrassed to see him with a brush in his hand.

By then Rubens had stepped back from the diplomatic missions that had carried him to the courts of Spain and England, and he was back in his Antwerp studio. 1635 was a busy year. He directed the decorations for the city's grand welcome of its new governor, the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, and he bought a country house called Het Steen. His body, though, was increasingly troubled by gout.

Rubens died in 1640. He and Helena had five children, and the youngest, a daughter, was born after his death. Frans, the toddler in this picture, grew up and lived until 1678.

The painting had its own adventures. It spent a long time with the family of the Dukes of Marlborough in England and later belonged to Baron Édouard de Rothschild in Paris. During the Second World War it was seized by the Nazis. It was returned to him in 1946, and in 1981 it came to the Metropolitan Museum as a gift of Charles Wrightsman and his wife.

Look again at Frans's raised hand. That small reaching gesture, from a child toddling along the garden path beside his parents, brings this grand family portrait to life.