Artists
Peter Paul Rubens
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b. 1577 and died 1640
Peter Paul Rubens was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter and a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well-known for his Counter- Reformation altarpieces, history paintings of allegorical subjects, landscapes, and portraits.
Rubens's upbringing mirrored the intense religious strife of his age--a fact that was to be of crucial importance in his artistic career. His father, an ardently Calvinist Antwerp lawyer, fled in 1568 to Germany to escape religious persecution, but after his death (1587) the family moved back to Antwerp, where Peter Paul was raised a Roman Catholic and received his early training as an artist and a courtier. By the age of 21 he was a master painter whose aesthetic and religious outlook led him to look to Italy as the place to complete his education. Upon arriving in Venice, he found inspiration in the radiant color and majestic forms of Titian, whose work had a formative influence on Rubens's mature style. During Rubens's 8 years (1600-08) as court painter to the duke of Mantua, he assimilated the lessons of the other Italian Renaissance masters His reputation established, Rubens returned (1608) to Antwerp following the death of his mother and quickly became the dominant artistic figure in the Spanish Netherlands.
In 1630, four years after the death of his first wife, the 53-year-old painter married 16-year-old Hélène Fourment. Hélène inspired the voluptuous figures in many of his paintings from the 1630s, including The Feast of Venus (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), The Three Graces (Prado, Madrid) and The Judgment of Paris (Prado, Madrid). In the latter painting, which was made for the Spanish court, the artist's young wife was recognized by viewers in the figure of Venus. In an intimate portrait of her, Hélène Fourment in a Fur Wrap, also known as Het Pelsken, Rubens's wife is even partially modeled after classical sculptures of the Venus Pudica, such as the Medici Venus. Fairytale in Fur is another example of Ruben’s unwavering admiration of his young wife, painting a woman with pearls, fur, the luxuries of royalty and the beauty found in the figures of classicism.