Helena Fourment with a Carriage

Helena Fourment with a Carriage (c. 1639) at the Louvre is among the last portraits Rubens painted of his second wife before his death in May 1640, and the outdoor setting — Hélène beside a carriage, about to depart or having just arrived — gives this intimate family portrait an unusual spatial openness compared to his more typical domestic interior subjects. By 1639 Hélène was about twenty-five years old and the mother of four of Rubens's five children; the portrait captures her at the height of her physical beauty in the outdoor light that Rubens rarely used for his female portraits, more commonly showing Hélène in the warm enclosed light of the domestic interior. The late Rubens's loose, atmospheric handling — his technique becoming increasingly free and gestural as his physical capacity declined — is particularly suited to outdoor light, where the harder edges of his earlier style would have been inappropriate. The Louvre's extensive Rubens holdings include several of the most intimate late works depicting Hélène alongside the monumental public commissions for the French monarchy.

The painting combines portraiture with landscape in Rubens' characteristic late style. The fluid brushwork and warm, luminous palette create an atmosphere of domestic elegance, while the carriage and garden setting establish the social context.

This late portrait of Rubens's second wife from 1639 is painted with the fluid technique of his final years. The canvas has been conserved with attention to the rich textile details. The painting has been relined. Some darkening in the background has occurred over the nearly four centuries since its creation.