The thing about Rubens was, he loved women. He loved his mother, Marie, who was the rock that anchored the family, he loved his first wife, Isabella Brand, his much younger second wife, Helena Fourment, his daughters.
And not to put too fine a point upon it, he liked plump rather than etiolated women. One of the points this exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery seeks to make is that Rubens’s women weren’t particularly well-upholstered, any more than the norm.
