Portrait of Albert and Nikolaus After Sir Peter Paul Rubens Oil Painting Board

Description

A portrait of Albert and Nicholas Rubens after Sir Peter Paul Rubens. The oil painting is on board / panel and signed by Richardson on the lower left. Features the two boys posing by an architectural column. The painting is framed in a Neoclassical wood frame with ribboned accents.

Peter Paul Rubens painted this dual portrait of his sons Albert and Nikolaus in 1626/27. Like his daughter Clara Serena, the two boys were from his first marriage to Isabella Brant and were aged thirteen and nine years old respectively at the time. The younger son Nikolaus still seems completely unselfconscious. Heedless of the onlooker, he is occupied in playing with his goldfinch, which is tethered by a string – a popular pastime for children at that time. Compared to his younger brother, Albert seems serious, almost grown up, not least on account of his fine clothing and the languid elegance of his pose. Encouraged by his father to read widely and devote himself to the Classics, the young boy had had his first poem in Latin published at the tender age of thirteen; the book he is holding is clearly intended to allude to his erudition. Albert Rubens went on to become one of the most highly regarded classical scholars of his age. The contrast between the brothers may be due to the difference in their ages or to their differing temperaments. There may also be a further level of meaning concealed in the picture: in his treatise on the greatest painters of Ancient Greece, Pliny wrote that Parrhasius, the consummate master of expression, painted a pair of young boys who embodied the composure (‘securitas’) and careless simplicity (‘simplicitas’) of their respective ages. Rubens’s portrait of his sons may well have been informed by this literary topos.

Condition

Very Good; Gently Used

Dimensions

26.5" x 3" x 22.5"; canvas 12" x 16" on board