Proof that Rubens really was a champion of the female sex: Rubens & Women, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery reviewed

‘She is a princess endowed with all the virtues of sex; long experience has taught her how to govern these people… I think that if Her Highness could govern in her own way, everything would turn out very happily.’

The ‘princess’ in question was Isabel Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain and regent of the Spanish Netherlands; ‘these people’ were the pesky, ungovernable Flemings and the author of the glowing testimonial was Peter Paul Rubens who, since the death of Isabel’s husband the Archduke Albert in 1621, had become her trusted diplomatic adviser. It was quite a step up for a mere court painter, especially one with a skeleton in the family closet. Before Peter Paul’s birth his lawyer father Jan had been adviser to another princess, Anna of Saxony, with whom he had had an affair that produced a son. In 1571 he had been arrested and thrown into prison, from which he was released only through the generosity and persistence of his ever-loving wife. Maria Rubens stood by her man.

Rubens’s mother was the formative influence who turned him into a champion of the female sex. That’s the idea, anyway, behind Rubens & Women, Dulwich Picture Gallery’s new exhibition – and for those who think ‘Rubens & Embonpoint’ might be a better title, the show amasses some convincing evidence.

Unlike Rembrandt and Hals, Rubens rarely painted companies of men; he does seem to have preferred the company of women. And the women he painted, real and mythological, were forces to be reckoned with: they wielded power on Olympus and on Earth. His Maria de’ Medici cycle for the Luxembourg Palace was the first such series to celebrate the achievements of a woman, and in his portraits of the French queen mother and the Archduchess Isabel – two of the 17th century’s most powerful women – he made no attempt to flatter their female vanity.