Rubens & Women

Dulwich Picture Gallery is one of the finest smaller art galleries in the London area. While its core collection is not large, the quality of its holdings places it amongst the best galleries of its kind. Indeed, one of the artists well represented in the collection is Rubens, the founder of the north European Baroque school, the subject of a special exhibition just opened and continuing until 28 January, 2024. I am pleased to announce that I shall give a webinar in connection with this exhibition, Rubens & Women, Friday, December 15. Dulwich has indeed been fortunate in securing some spectacular loans from collections not only in the UK, but from Florence, Madrid, Dresden and his home city of Antwerp, bringing together paintings and drawings that explore the work of this great painter throughout his long career seen through the prism of this fascinating subject.

Casual visitors to art galleries might be forgiven for associating the theme of ‘Rubens & Women’ with large-bodied viragos and goddesses, and it is true that he painted his fair share of these. However, that would be to ignore a quite different category of more personal, indeed intimate depictions of women. Foremost amongst there are the portraits of his two wives, Isabella Brant (who died in 1626) and Helena Fourment (whom he married in 1630), together with poignant depictions of his daughter, Clara Serena, who died in 1623 aged 12. His career took him all over Europe, to Italy, Spain France and England, all the time sought after as a portraitist and painter of religious and allegorical compositions. Some of the remarkable women he painted, indeed worked for over an extended period, are included in the exhibition, not least the formidable Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia who was governor of the Spanish Low Countries in the early 17th century. The exhibition features not only truly beautiful oil paintings, but an exquisite series of drawings of outstanding quality.