Helena Fourment in a Fur Robe

“[…] I decided to get married because I was not yet ready to live in the renunciationthat is celibacy. […] I took a wife from a good but bourgeois family, although the whole world tried to convince me to marry a lady of the court. But I feared the pride, the plague of nobility […], and thus I liked the idea of taking a wife who does not blush when she sees me pick up a brush.” (Rubens in a letter to his friend Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc.) In December 1630, the 53-year-old Rubens married the 16-year-old daughter of the Antwerp silkmerchant Daniel Fourment. Even Rubens’s closest friends did not refrain from alluding to the great age difference between the bride and groom. His first wife, Isabella Brandt, had died of the plague in 1626. The traditional title of the painting, “her pelzken” (“The Little Fur”), comes from Rubens himself, who bequeathed the work to his young wife as a private gift. She never sold the painting; it was inherited by her children and is not documented in the inventory of the Picture Gallery before 1730. Helena’s sensual body is covered only partially by a dark fur robe, which is depicted in all its beauty. She seems to be stepping slightly to the left, while her torso remains at rest. The posture of her arms is no coincidence: it resembles the classical type of the Venus Pudica – bashful concealment or coquettish suggestion – the effect remains open. The red of the fabric on which she is standing corresponds gently with her slightly pink skin to intensify again in her reddened cheeks and sensual lips. Thus Rubens goes beyond the pure portrait genre: the image of Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, resonates in the painting. In addition he is quoting from the work of a great colleague: shortly before the creation of the present painting, Rubens had the opportunity to see Titian’s Girl in a Fur (KHM, GG 89) in the collection of the English king and copy it. There, the charming contrast between the fair, soft skin and the dark, velvety fur had been celebrated once before. © Cäcilia Bischoff, Masterpieces of the Picture Gallery. A Brief Guide to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna 2010