Portrait of Helena Fourment (1614-1673), the Artist’s Second Wife

Entry

Helena, the eleventh and youngest child of Daniel and Clara (née Stappaert) Fourment, was baptized on 1 April 1614 in the Sint Jacobskerk, Antwerp. Her father was a successful silk and tapestry dealer, and the family became related to Rubens when the sister of Isabella Brant (d. 1626), his first wife, married a Fourment son.¹² Rubens would have come into renewed contact with Daniel Fourment after his return to Antwerp from London in the spring of 1630 over the tapestry series of the Story of Achilles, the modelli for which by Rubens have been dated circa 1630, although the circumstances surrounding the series’ conception remains obscure.¹³ The marriage with Helena took place on 6 December of that year in the Sint Jacobskerk, some eight months after his return following an absence (not counting the inside of a week) of about one and three-quarter years. In that time Helena would have matured into a young woman, whose beauty was to be celebrated.¹⁴ In a famous letter to his friend, the well-known antiquarian Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637), of 18 December 1634 (misdated as 1635), Rubens reported that he had taken ‘…a young wife from an honest but bourgeois family … I chose one who would not blush to see me take my brushes in hand’.¹⁵ Helena bore Rubens five children; the last was born just over eight months after his death on 30 May 1640.¹⁶ As a result of her marriage, Helena became a rich, prominent and ennobled member of the Antwerp patriciate, and Rubens portrayed her as such in the full-length portrait in the Louvre, in which she steps out into the street to her waiting carriage.¹⁷

In 1644, when she was thirty years old, Helena married Jonkheer Jan Baptist van Brouchoven van Bergeyk, an ex-alderman of the city of Antwerp, who went on to have a distinguished diplomatic career in the service of the king of Spain. He was elevated to the barony of Bergeyck in 1665 and created a count in 1676, three years after the death of Helena, which took place in Brussels where the couple had lived latterly. She was buried in the Sint Jacobskerk, Antwerp, beside her first husband according to the instruction of her will of 1658. She had borne her second husband six children.¹⁸ Evidence from a letter of 9 November 1671 shows that she was, indeed, a person of influence.¹⁹ She had, of course, also twice been a fecund wife.

Although there is no portrait of Helena that can be said to be documented in the strictest sense, her likeness can be established by the physiognomy (admittedly generalized) of Venus in the Prado Judgement of Paris contemporaneously identified as having her features in a letter by the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand²⁰ and Het Pelsken as named by Rubens (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) an intimate portrayal in which she covers herself only in a fur wrap and which remained in her possession.²¹ Two portraits in the Munich Alte Pinakothek were among the 105 paintings acquired from Gisbert van Colen (or Ceulen, 1636-1703) in 1698 by Max-Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, as ‘2. Portraits van der Madame Rubens’.²² One of these two portraits was the prototype of the present picture, which was similarly identified when first referred to in print in 1787. Van Colen was married to a niece of Helena Fourment.²³ And there can be no reason to doubt the traditional identification of these two portraits.

The museum picture (which is on a composite oak support of two pieces of timber originating from the west German/Netherlandish region and available for use from 1626) has been associated with that in Munich since 1842,²⁴ when it was believed to be preliminary to it, a theory last embraced by Norris, just over a hundred years later.²⁵ Vlieghe recorded Burchard’s opinion that the central portion – of the face with the chest and upper part of the garment – was autograph;²⁶ his own view was in agreement with that of Glück, published in 1920,²⁷ that it was a copy.

Glück, followed recently by Van Hout,²⁸ praised the brushwork in the picture, and believed it to be the work of the studio, or a pupil, a view recently embraced also by the Rubenshuis Rubens in Private exhibition.²⁹ The most recent judgement of the museum is that it emanated from Rubens’s circle; indeed, the support was available for use from 1626. But, the brushwork seems not to be reminiscent of Rubens’s studio in the last decade of his life; judging from a colour reproduction, a picture in the Palazzo Rospigliosi, Rome, recorded in an inventory of 1713, has a better claim to such a status.³⁰ However, it is likely that the present picture was made directly after the Munich picture rather than after the copy of it in Rome. The lack of detail in the collar (for example) might indicate that the painting was made sometime after the execution of the original, when the varnish had discoloured sufficiently to obscure such detail.

The provenance of the original in Munich before its sale in 1698 is not known; it may have remained in the possession of the blood descendants of the artist and Helena Fourment, and that it came into Van Colen’s ownership through his wife, Helena’s niece Maria, whom he married in 1668 and who died in 1697. There is as yet no record of the Rijksmuseum copy before its listing in the Dutartre collection in 1787. For a visitor to Lucien Bonaparte’s collection in Rome in 1816, it was ‘not unlike a picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds’ (1723-1792).³¹ But this should not be taken as a realistic indication of the picture’s age (although it might explain Smith’s extravagant, unpublished admiration of it); the painting is more likely to have been made as a memorial for a descendant of the sitter, perhaps when the prototype was passed on by inheritance and before its sale in 1698.

The costume worn by the sitter has been described as a wedding dress thus implying that the original was painted circa 1630,³² as the wedding took place on 6 December of that year. Gordenker has described the costume in the Munich prototype as ‘a white brocaded, basqued bodice with a stomacher and a skirt of the same fabric, virago sleeves tied at the elbows with strings of jewels and a black silk gown.’³³ The white brocade fabric of the dress – in fact perhaps silver and gold brocade – was in her view appropriate for a wedding, as would have been the sitter’s luxurious appearance (Gordenker described the jewellery worn as ‘remarkably rich’). But no veil is worn, and the costume is not an overall white or silver, the colour considered proper for noble wedding ceremonies.³⁴ The ring displayed on the little finger of the right hand (in the Munich picture) cannot be identified as a wedding ring.

Vlieghe, followed most recently by Logan,³⁵ has been among those authorities to deny that the costume was that worn by the bride at her wedding. As yet, the questions posed by the costume – whether it was: a) that worn by the sitter as a bride, at the church ceremony; b) that it was that worn on her wedding day; or c) that it was not worn for such a special occasion – must remain unresolved, as was implicitly recognized by Renger.³⁶ This need not affect the dating of the prototype, although the sequence of Rubens’s portraits of his second wife has not been established or agreed.

The sitter’s face in the Munich prototype of the present picture seems less mature than in the Vienna Het Pelsken, the Venus in the Prado Judgement of Paris or in the portrait in the Louvre, in which she steps out into the street. The preparatory drawing for it, in which the dress is simpler and the pose very slightly different, is in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen;³⁷ it seems likely to be contemporary with the full-face, half-length finished study in the Courtauld Institute, in which the sitter seems dressed for church.³⁸ Logan believes that the full-length study is of circa 1631; for Held, the half-length drawing was of 1630-32,³⁹ and Vlieghe has dated the Munich portrait circa 1631, believing that Helena was carrying her first child born in January 1632. The sprig of orange in her hair would thus allude to her fertility.

The sitter wears a string of pearls, pearl pendants, a jewel-encrusted clasp on her head and an elaborate brooch at her chest supported by a chain round her shoulder.⁴⁰ Pointon has identified this breast jewel as probably that listed by the 1645 inventory of Rubens’s effects as ‘a large round jewel of diamonds, all [?] flat stones and sixteen triangles valued at 6900 guilders ’.⁴¹ She wore a similar but not identical pendant in the Courtauld Institute drawing and the Louvre painting referred to above; the jewellery is more sumptuous than any worn by Rubens’s first wife.

The pose in the Munich prototype brings to mind Anthony van Dyck’s (1599-1641) portrait of Isabella Brant;⁴² this may not have been fortuitous. It seems likely that Rubens portrayed his sumptuously arrayed new wife as a record of, and in celebration of, both their wedding and their marriage.

Although the present picture and a portrait by Van Dyck (SK-C-284) entered the Bonaparte collection separately, they came to be considered as pendants and were regarded as such by Smith and Van der Hoop.

Gregory Martin, 2022