1626; and four years later, in 1630, the painter, when he was
a man of fifty years, re-married another connection of his own, Helena
Fourment, a girl only in her sixteenth year. Both of his wives were
handsome, fair, full-formed Flemish beauties. Elizabeth (in Spanish,
Isabella) Brant's beauty was of a finer order than that of her
successor, expressing larger capacity of affection and intellect. But on
Helena Fourment Rubens doted, while to both women he seems to have been
affectionately attached. He has painted them so often, that the face of
no painter's wife is so familiar to the art world, and even to the
greater world without, as are the faces of these two women, and above
all, that of Helena Fourment. He had seven children, who frequently
figure in their mothers' portraits. He has left notable portraits of his
two sons by his first wife, of his eldest daughter, Clara Eugenia, when
eight years of age, and of his daughter Elizabeth, a buxom baby, dressed
in velvet and point lace, playing with toys.

After a life of unbroken success and the highest honours, the last
distinction conferred on Rubens was, that he was chosen to arrange the
gala, and to be the right-hand man who should conduct the Cardinal
Infant, the successor of Clara Eugenia, on his first entrance into
Antwerp. But the hand of premature disease and death, which not even he
could resist, was already on the great painter; his constitution had
been undermined by repeated attacks of gout, and he died at the age of
sixty years, in 1640. He was the possessor of great wealth at the time
of his death, and only a part of his collection, which was then sold,
brought so large a sum in those days, as twenty thousand pounds. Rubens'
second wife, Helena Fourment, to whom he had been married ten years,
survived him, a widow at twenty-six years of age Rubens' portrait is
even better known than those of his wives, for, as I have said of
Raphael in his popularity, Rubens in his life is the beau-ideal of a
painter to the many. The portrait is worthy of the man, with something
gallant in the manliness, and with thought tempering what might have
been too much of bravado and too much of debonnairete in the traits. His
features are handsome in their Flemish fulness, and match well with
hazel eyes, chestnut hair, and a ruddy complexion; his long moustache is
turned up, and he wears the pointed beard which we see so often in the
portraits by Rubens' scholar, Van Dyck. The grea