Isabella Brandt (?)
by RUBENS, Peter Paul, Oil on oak, 98 x 72 cm
The artist’s first wife, Isabella Brant, may be the subject of this portrait of about 1626, the year of her early death. Its bold red background typifies Rubens’s self-imposed pictorial challenges, trusting that his elegiac, posthumous image, with its massively enlarged eyes and strong yet graceful hands, could and would win over the regally demanding, flaming colour.