Rubens, His Wife and Son

In this remarkable double self-portrait, painted around 1635, Peter Paul Rubens depicts himself with his second wife, Helena Fourment, and their young son Frans, set within the idealized garden of his own mansion in Antwerp. Rubens was fifty-three and a celebrated master when he married the sixteen-year-old Helena in 1630; here he paints not a myth or a biblical scene, but his own life — a rare and intimate act of biography from one of the most powerful painters of the Baroque era.

The leather strap across Rubens's chest signals his right, as a nobleman, to bear a sword, while a matching ribbon across his small son's chest playfully casts the boy as his father's heir. The tender juxtaposition of Helena's youthful hand against her husband's weathered one speaks quietly to the nearly forty-year gap between them — a detail contemporaries recognized immediately, as Helena was widely celebrated as Rubens's muse.

The painting's history is as dramatic as its subject: seized by the Nazis from Baron Édouard de Rothschild in Paris during the Second World War, the canvas was recovered and restituted to the Rothschild family in 1946 — a survivor of one of the darkest chapters in the history of art collecting. This museum-quality stretched canvas reproduction faithfully captures the warmth and intimacy of Rubens's original, printed on premium matte canvas and hand-wrapped around a solid 0.75-inch gallery wrap frame — ready to hang and built to last.