This portrait of an unidentified but clearly well-to-do lady, perhaps about twenty-five years of age, has been unknown for much of the 20^th century, hidden away in the collection of the descendants of Charles Butler until very recently, and unpublished since 1933. Its recent emergence onto the art market and subsequent cleaning and restoration has allowed the work to be assessed by scholars for the first time in nearly a century. The revelation of substantial pentimenti during cleaning have elucidated the creative process and confirm this to be the prime original of this beautiful composition, now restored to the oeuvre of Sir Peter Paul Rubens.

While Rubens’ ambition and creative genius led him to favour grand histories and mythologies over portraiture, he was instrumental in liberating the art of portraiture from the somewhat schematic formality that characterizes the genre in the late sixteenth century. Rubens possessed an innate talent to reveal the character of a sitter, to achieve in their depiction a corporeal reality of flesh and blood, and often, as here, to reveal a certain exuberance of spirit in his sitter. His portrait style was formed in Italy and is best seen there in his portraits of Genoese ladies, such as that of Brigida Spinola Doria.¹ These early portraits, like other aspects of his art at the time, have as their foundation the art of sixteenth century Venice and particularly the portraits of Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. In them and in subsequent portraits he enlivened traditional schematic forms with a rich palette, exuberant brushwork, illusionistic foreshortening and, from around 1610, a marked plasticity in his depiction of flesh, achieved as much through colour as through form.

Max Rooses, the pre-eminent authority on Rubens of his time, was the first to publish this painting, identifying it in his 1890 catalogue of the painted œuvre of Rubens and tentatively linking it with an entry in the inventory made on Rubens’ death, where it is described as ‘un pourtrait d'une Damoiselle ayant les mains l'une sur l'autre’. Rooses also noted the inscription ‘Virgo Brabantina’, undoubtedly added some time after the painting’s completion and since removed. Of the scholars who published their opinions Rooses seems to have been the only one to have inspected the painting at first hand, commenting on the colours and noting that it was well preserved and ‘entirely by the hand of the master’, enthusing that the flesh and hands were ‘deliciously rendered’.² By 1890 the painting was in the collection of Charles Butler who had acquired it at Christie’s in 1878 at the deceased sale of Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro of Novar (1797–1864), a voracious nineteenth-century collector and, famously, Turner’s greatest patron (see below).

Rooses dated the portrait to circa 1625, a dating broadly agreed with by all modern scholars including Christopher Brown, Katlijne Van der Stighelen, Hans Vlieghe, Ben van Beneden, and Elizabeth McGrath. It is one of a small group of female portraits painted in the first half of the 1620s which includes the famous Chapeau de Paille in the National Gallery, London, the portrait of a woman on panel in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and the portrait of Anne of Austria in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, from 1622 (fig. 1).³ With this latter work the painting shares much in common, not just in the general three-quarter pose but also in the execution of the hair and facial details. From a distance, the hair in both portraits appears precisely rendered, but on closer inspection a series of exquisitely fine and deftly applied yellow highlights are revealed, precisely placed to give the hair and curls a compelling sense of volume, to achieve this effect. Both heads conform to a courtly female type that we encounter first with the 1620 Portrait of the Countess of Arundel and her train (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), in which the sitter is turned slightly to her right, thus showing off one side of her coiffure and the soft flesh of her face.⁴ The close association in pose of our sitter with that of Anne of Austria and the Countess of Arundel could be indicative of her high status, however the sitter might equally represent a friend or member of Rubens’ extended family. In addition to the somewhat informal air of the sitter, the former inscription ‘Virgo Brabantina’ (literally, Virgin of Brabant, whose territories included Antwerp, Brussels and much of what is now the southern Netherlands) is likely to be indicative of the sitter’s Flemish origins, and it is interesting to note that throughout the painting’s exhibition history at the Royal Academy in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, the sitter was presumed to be a member of the artist’s family.

With the sitter’s hands we encounter the next conformity to a type. Where Anne of Austria’s hands are rather Van Dyckian in their elongation, the hands in the present portrait are painted with the soft fleshiness of Rubens’ nudes and putti and with the unmistakable spirited liveliness of his brush. It is highly likely that in the first instance Rubens prepared a drawing for the hands. He probably kept this drawing, for they appear again in a portrait of a woman until recently thought to be Rubens’ wife Isabella Brant but now considered anonymous and hailing from Rubens’ studio, in the Mauritshuis, The Hague (fig. 2).⁵ Another painting employing the same arrangement of hands is depicted in David Teniers the Younger’s Gallery of Archduke Leopold which, though having the appearance of a Rubens, has never been formally identified with an extant work by the master.⁶ From preliminary studies that survive we can deduce that Rubens regularly drew several different aspects of a portrait, be it a head, hands, or drapery, before embarking on the painted portrait itself. Rubens’ letters to Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel in 1620, regarding the above-mentioned portrait of the Countess of Arundel, reveal that he had completed studies of the heads of various figures, life-size, as well as of certain poses and costumes, to which he would then refer once the canvas for the finished work arrived. Similarly, in his 1672 biography of Rubens, Bellori mentions the studies Rubens completed for the portraits of the Infanta Isabella and Ambrogio Spinola who both sat to him in Antwerp on their return from the siege of Breda in 1625.⁷ The final portrait was thus a complex exercise of piecing together and adjusting, similar to the process involved in the production of his large religious, mythological and historical scenes.

The dating of this portrait to the early to mid-1620s is supported by the dress and hairstyle, the latter of which predominates in female portraits from this time. The form of dress is one seen in two portraits of Rubens’ wife, Isabella Brant, the first painted by Van Dyck just before his departure for Italy in 1621 (National Gallery of Art, Washington)⁸ and the second by Rubens himself in the famous portrait now in the Uffizi, Florence (fig. 3).⁹ As here, Isabella wears a white undergarment with a small, starched lace collar that stands upright inside of the high-backed black collar of her dress. She wears a black outer garment with half-sleeves and, in the Uffizi portrait, very similar jewelry. There are similar affinities with the dress and jewelry of the lady in the afore-mentioned Louvre portrait. The mise-en-scène is similar to the Uffizi portrait, with a plain red material backdrop covering three quarters of the background, and a vista to the left, much in the spirit of the portraiture of the great Venetians Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese that had such an effect on Rubens during his travels to Venice in the first decade of the 17^th century.

The recent cleaning of the painting revealed significant pentimenti that had been previously touched out and which were not therefore evident to the turn of the century scholars. Most obvious amongst these is that of the curtain which originally covered a far larger proportion of the sky, extending to a point below where the lower part of the translucent shawl crosses the sitter’s arm. The infra-red images reveal clear changes to the contour of the black costume around the proper left shoulder where it has been extended over the curtain, just as an area of the costume lower right has been extended over the sky. More minor changes to the positioning of the fingers and hands, which are reserved against the costume, and also a change to the size of the cuff (fig. 4), are also apparent. Such pentimenti, which demonstrate how the artist made numerous adjustments and changes as part of the creative process, are clear indications that this is the prime original of this composition.

Rubens was at or near his busiest in the 1620s both as artist and, from 1623, diplomat. Some of his largest commissions date from this time, including the History of Constantine tapestry series (1622–23), the Marie de’ Medici series (1622–25) and the Triumph of the Eucharist tapestry series (1625–27). He was receiving commissions from kings, princes, dukes, archduchesses and other important patrons in Madrid, Paris, Brussels and elsewhere. As is the case with much of Rubens’ output , some elements of the present composition may arguably have been carried out by an assistant, and as Hans Vlieghe has noted of the master’s œuvre, ‘the work of [Rubens’] studio was based on the traditional division of labour in Italian Renaissance workshops, that is, between the creative master and the pupils and apprentices who assisted him at different levels and played a varying part in the execution of his compositions.’¹⁰ Modern scholars disagree on the degree of studio participation in this portrait. Elizabeth McGrath believes that studio participation is limited to the red curtain, while Ben van Beneden and Katlijne Van der Stighelen, to varying degrees, believe that some or all of the drapery may be due to the studio. Hans Vlieghe posits that the painting is largely the product of the studio – an opinion which has not found scholarly support elsewhere. Professor Christopher Brown considers the painting to be an autograph work by Rubens, echoing the earlier conclusions of Max Rooses, and notes that it is a major rediscovery. Indeed it is one of only a handful of female portraits by this great master to come to the market in a generation.

NOTE ON PROVENANCE

Hugh Munro of Novar (1797–1864) was a voracious collector of Old Masters as well as being perhaps the greatest collector of contemporary British art in the 19^th century. He was, perhaps most famously, J.M.W. Turner’s greatest patron and one of his closest friends. Munro’s friendship with Turner is remarkable given the artist’s famous curmudgeonliness but his diffident manner and unaffected love of art appealed to the artist. Waagen described Munro as one ‘in whom the love of art alone is the inducement’. He was the son of Sir Alexander Munro, Consul General in Madrid who died in 1809 leaving him the Novar estate in Ross-shire, Scotland. Shy, but clubbable enough to join the Dilettanti Society in 1850, Munro spent the greater part of his life collecting paintings.

The Old Master paintings Munro acquired were widely admired by his contemporaries. As well as this Rubens, he also owned Rembrandt’s late masterpiece Lucretia (National Gallery OF Art, Washington; fig. 5), Titian's Rest on the Flight into Egypt (private collection), Claude's elegiac Landscape with St Philip baptising the Eunuch (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff) and many other important works by Poussin, Watteau and others. The most famous work in the collection was a version of Raphael's Madonna dei Candelabri (Baltimore Museum and Art Gallery). The majority of his oil paintings are now dispersed around international museums.

Munro was eventually to own fifteen oil paintings by Turner, among them some of Turner’s most famous and brilliant works (such as Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, sold in these Rooms, 7 July 2010, for £29.7m; now J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), and one hundred and nine watercolours. Munro had several other artist friendships, Constable and Landseer for example, but none with the same level of intimacy as Turner. On his death, Munro left his art collection to his sister Isabella and her son Henry Munro, who engaged Christie's to sell it in 1877 and 1878 in what would be one of the greatest sales of the 19^th century.

¹ National Gallery of Art, Washington. See F. Huemer, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard. Part XIX, Portraits, vol I, London 1977, pp. 169–70, no. 41, reproduced fig. 119.

² Gluck and Oldenbourg clearly state their opinions to be from a photograph only. Both the 1905 and 1933 entries that are referred to in the literature start ‘Ich kenne dieses Bildnis nicht aus eigener Anschauung’.

³ In order, see M. Jaffé, Rubens. Catalogo completo, Milan 1990, p. 279, no. 756, reproduced; p. 286, no. 801, reproduced; p. 270, no. 698, reproduced.

⁴ Jaffe 1990, p. 262, no. 652, reproduced.

⁵ See H.R. Hoetink (ed.), The Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, New York 1985, p. 433, no. 250, reproduced.

⁶ See M. Diaz-Padron, David Teniers, Jan Bruegel y los gabinetes de pinturas, exh. cat., Madrid 1992, pp. 7887, no. 2, reproduced.

⁷ Jaffe 1990, p. 286, no. 799, reproduced p. 287. Sometimes a servant would dress in the clothes and attitude desired by the sitter with Rubens adding the portrait and hands from the earlier finished studies from life. Such was the case for the portrait of the Ducque de Lerma and that of Brigida Spinola-Doria. The pose or attitude might differ from study to finished portrait to do justice to the sitter’s social position; for example, where in the drawn study Hendrick van Thulden is somewhat slumped in, and enveloped by, his chair, in the finished portrait he is more upright, alert and monumental; see Vlieghe, 1987, nos. 152 and 152a, reproduced figs 220 and 221.

⁸ O. Millar, S.J. Barnes et al., Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven 2004, no. I.100.

⁹ Jaffe 1990, p. 299, no. 875, reproduced.

¹⁰ H. Vlieghe in The Dictionary of Art, J. Turner (ed.), vol. 27, New York 1996, p. 298.