There was more to the female figures in Peter Paul Rubens’s paintings than being ‘Rubenesque’

Sooner or later within the nineteenth century, the ladies depicted by Pieter Paul Rubens grew to become typecast and described in English as “Rubenesque”. The time period grew to become shorthand for a voluptuous feminine physique, alluding to the Flemish Baroque grasp’s penchant for nudes. Rubens’s fame as a painter of the flesh was bolstered extra not too long ago by Fb, whose censorship of nudity within the artist’s works provoked a criticism from the Flanders vacationer board.

It’s a notion that the curators of the Dulwich Image Gallery’s autumn exhibition, Rubens and Girls, hope to dispel—or not less than complicate. The present is billed as the primary to look at the “different and necessary place occupied by ladies, each actual and imagined, in [Rubens’s] world”. The theme was impressed by the proliferation of feminine figures within the gallery’s personal Rubens holdings and by the artist’s biography. “The extra we checked out Rubens the person, the extra we realised how important ladies had been within the story of his life,” says the artwork historian Amy Orrock, the exhibition’s co-curator.

Besieged with commissions from the courts of Europe and aspiring artists who flocked to his Italianate palazzo-studio in Antwerp, Rubens as soon as declared himself “the busiest and most harassed man on the earth”. And but, “he nonetheless discovered time to color over 50 portraits of his members of the family,” notes Ben van Beneden, the present’s co-curator and former director of the Rubenshuis. “That tells us one thing in regards to the significance he hooked up to household life and to his family members.”

Tender portraits of Rubens’s first spouse, Isabella Brant, and their daughter Clara Serena will seem within the first room of the present. There’s a poignant chance that they had been made as memorials: Isabella died, in all probability of the plague, solely three years after the lack of Clara, aged 12. Isabella’s options will also be discerned within the Virgin in Adoration Earlier than the Sleeping Christ Youngster (round 1618), demonstrating how Rubens infused his non secular commissions with statement from life.

Among the sensuous goddesses and nymphs of the late mythological work resemble his second spouse, Helena Fourment, whose likeness is captured in a nude examine from the Musée du Louvre. This will probably be displayed alongside nudes impressed by one other, no much less important, supply: classical sculpture, such because the marble Crouching Venus (2nd century AD) from the British Museum.

But greater than merely nude, Rubens’s “kind” of girl was highly effective, energetic, even brave. “He typically presents his ladies in heroic methods, at a really dramatic excessive level of a biblical or historic narrative,” Orrock says. In Diana Getting back from the Hunt (round 1615), as an illustration, the muscular goddess is “posed like an historical Roman warrior”.

The exhibition’s closing part will argue that Rubens’s ladies had been sure up in concepts of struggle and peace. The artist lived below the shadow of the Eighty Years’ Struggle and advocated for peace as a diplomatic agent to the ruler of the Spanish Netherlands. Towards that backdrop, he portrayed historical Roman goddesses because the idealised “bringers of peace and many” and a “life-giving drive”, Orrock says. Nowhere is that clearer than within the present’s closing work: The Delivery of the Milky Method (1636-38), a female creation fantasy by which the spill of Juno’s breast milk provides start to the cosmos.

• Rubens and Girls, Dulwich Image Gallery, London, 27 September-28 January 2024