Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640 Antwerp), Portrait of Clara Serena Rubens, the artist’s daughter, c.1623, Oil on panel, 36.2 x 26.4 cm, Private European collection, on loan to the Dulwich Galery, London
Clara Serena Rubens, the daughter of Peter Paul Rubens and Isabella Brant, was born in 1611 and died in 1623 just before her thirteenth birthday. Her loss was deeply felt by the artist, who wrote with striking candour to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc of the grief that weighed upon him. Rubens rarely allowed such emotion to surface in writing; this portrait, made around the time of her death, offers a more enduring expression of that loss in paint.
The panel presents Clara Serena with a candour unusual in Rubens’s portraiture. It is intimate in scale, without the pageantry or allegorical trappings of his public commissions, and its directness is striking. Her features recall those of her mother Isabella Brant, linking the painting to Rubens’s celebrated double portrait of himself and Isabella in Munich, and to the paired portraits he painted of her in the 1620s. In later years Rubens would again turn to domestic likeness in the portraits of his second wife, Hélène Fourment, and their children, where the boundary between family image and artistic invention was equally porous. In Clara Serena’s portrait, however, the sense of immediacy is heightened by the shadow of her imminent death, which makes this image one of the most personal to survive from his hand.
The attribution of the painting has not been straightforward. Accepted as Rubens’s work until the mid-twentieth century, it was reclassified in 1947 as the work of a follower. When deaccessioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sold at Christie’s in 2013, the portrait underwent conservation. The removal of later green overpaint revealed brushwork consistent with Rubens’s style. Dendrochronology confirmed that the panel matched his working chronology, and stylistic reassessment—particularly in the handling of flesh tones and light—returned the work to his oeuvre. Today it is widely accepted as authentic.
Placed within the context of Rubens’s family portraits, Clara Serena Rubens demonstrates how private likeness could stand alongside the grand mythologies, altarpieces, and diplomatic allegories for which he is better known. It shows Rubens not as court painter or negotiator but as father, turning the language of portraiture inward to preserve the memory of a child whose life was cut short. In doing so, the painting not only testifies to a moment of personal loss but also reveals how Rubens used portraiture as a means of binding family, art, and memory into a single enduring image.