[Illustration: PETER PAUL RUBENS, BY HIMSELF
_In Windsor Castle, England._]
[Illustration: HELENA FOURMENT, BY RUBENS]
Rubens was so happy with his first wife, Isabella Brandt, who died
after eighteen years of blissful married life with him, that he could
not endure the loneliness of being a widower, but four years after
Isabella’s death took as his second wife Helena Fourment. This marriage
proved to be as happy as the first; although he was already fifty-three
and she barely sixteen. Their union was blessed with five handsome
children; so that his declining years found him surrounded by youth and
beauty, and with a splendid young wife as comrade.
[Illustration: HELENA FOURMENT, BY RUBENS
_A portrait of the artist’s second wife and two of their children,
hanging in the Louvre, Paris._]
During the eighteen years of his first marriage Isabella appeared in
nearly all his large pictures. She was of a more refined type than
Helena; so that, with his second marriage, when he began to introduce
his second wife into his pictures, his style becomes broader and more
vigorous. For Helena had a strong, fully developed figure of pronounced
contour, rosy flesh tints, golden hair, and lips that seemed always
partly open to show the flash of pure white teeth. These were her
attractions. She was obviously more beautiful, more brilliant, than
Isabella, although in her youth her development was somewhat too
luxuriant,--a picture of healthy, bursting, buoyant young womanhood.
Indeed, so proud does Rubens seem of having, at his age, won a woman
of her pronounced and youthful charms, that in some of his pictures
he expresses them too freely, as, for example, in the Helena in a fur
pelisse in the Imperial Gallery, Vienna. That Rubens drew a vast amount
of inspiration from his two wives, Isabella and Helena, is obvious to
anyone familiar with his work; for they appear in picture after picture
from his brush. His married life, first with Isabella and then with
Helena, was a constant stimulus to his best work.