Portrait of Anne of Austria (1601-1666), Queen of France

Scientific examination and reports

dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 27 oktober 1995
technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 12 december 2006

Conservation

W.A. Hopman, 1851 - 1854: cleaned and restored

Provenance

…; collection Jacob Hoofman (1739-99), Haarlem; his daughter Maria Hoofman (1776-1845), Haarlem;¹R. van Eynden and A. van der Willigen, Geschiedenis de vaderlandsche schilderkunst, sedert de helft der XVIII eeuw, 4 vols., Haarlem 1816-40 (1842), III, pp. 423-24, 482. from whom or whose estate purchased by dealer Christianus Johannes Nieuwenhuys (1799-1883), London; from whom, fl. 12,000, to Willem II, King of the Netherlands, 30 January 1846;²E. Hinterding and F. Horsch, ‘‘A Small but Choice Collection’: The Art Gallery of King William II of the Netherlands (1792-1849)’, Simiolus 19 (1989), pp. 5-122, esp. p. 78, under no. 68, as a portrait of Marie de Médicis. his sale, The Hague (J. de Vries et al.), 12 August 1850, no. 68 (‘H. 100. L. 72 cm. Bois. Portrait de Marie de Médicis. Une large fraise autour du cou, à la mode de cette époque; dans la main droite une bouquet de fléurs, la main gauche reposant sur le genou.’), bought in at fl. 3,960;³Copy RKD. his sale The Hague (J. de Vries et al.), 9 September 1851, no. 47, fl. 3,000, to the dealer Johannes Albertus Brondgeest for Adriaen van der Hoop (1778-1854);⁴Van der Hoop Lijst, p. 44, no. 251; ‘Door denzelfden [J.A. Brondgeest] gekocht in de Veiling van het restant van de Galerij van wijlen Z.M. koning Willem II, een portret van Maria de Medicis, door P.P. Rubbens, zijnde afkomstig van de Verzameling Schilderijen van wijlen Juffr.w Hoofdman te Haarlem, wier erfgenamen hetzelve met eenige andere […] gekocht à 3000: - 7½ % opdd ˶ 225 -1 4% Courte ˶ 120:-/ Onkosten voor 1 kist ˶ 8: - ˶…3,353//Dit fraaije Schilderij was zeer vuil en verwaarloosd; is thans schoon gemaakt door den Heer Hopman’. by whom bequeathed to the City of Amsterdam with 223 other paintings, 1854;⁵Van der Hoop Taxatie 1854, p. 1, no. 251: ‘P.P. Rubbens. Portret van Maria de Medicis, fl. 1000’. on loan to the museum from the City of Amsterdam, 30 June 1885; on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 2004-11⁶Provenance also reconstructed in A. Pollmer-Schmidt, ‘Catalogus van de schilderijen in de verzameling van Adriaan van der Hoop’, in E. Bergvelt et al. (eds.), De Hollandse meesters van een Amsterdamse bankier. De verzameling van Adriaan van der Hoop (1778-1854), exh. cat. Amsterdam (Amsterdams Historisch Museum/Rijksmuseum) 2004-05, pp. 135-195, esp. p. 171, no. 149.

ObjectNumber: SK-C-296

Credit line: On loan from the City of Amsterdam (A. van der Hoop Bequest)

The artist

Biography

Peter Paul Rubens (Siegen 1577 - Antwerp 1640)

Peter Paul Rubens was born on the eve of the feast day of the saints Peter and Paul (after whom he was named) – on 28 June 1577 – in Siegen, Westphalia, the son of a Protestant lawyer Jan (1530-1588), who with his wife Maria (1538-1608) had left their native Antwerp in 1568. He died a long professed Catholic in Antwerp on 30 May 1640 after an immensely successful career as a painter, from which he amassed a fortune, and as a public servant in the service of the Archduchess Isabella, the Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and of his sovereign, her nephew, King Philip IV of Spain.

His oeuvre includes well over a thousand paintings – partly made possible by a well-organized studio – supplemented by an extensive group of drawings and of engravings after his work, the production of which he supervised. Much of his output was of religious subjects, but he also specialized in mythologies; he was an innovative landscape painter and a sympathetic portraitist especially of friends and members of his family. Four elaborate tapestry series were designed by him, and he occasionally followed the then current Antwerp practice of collaborating with other independent artists.

Rubens’s protean genius encompassed other fields: he was well versed in classical literature (like other educated men of his time) and in archaeology; he published a book on contemporary Genoese architecture and contributed to architectural design in Antwerp. An avid collector (and successful dealer) of paintings, classical sculpture, gems, and drawings by other masters, he was an expert iconographer, and a regular contributor of designs for frontispieces. Recent research has shown he was an active investor in property and a generous financier.

Three artists are later recorded as his teachers in Antwerp, where his widowed, and now Catholic mother had returned, of which the last, the learned Otto van Veen (1556-1629) was the most influential. In May 1600, two years after he had become a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke, he went to Italy, from where he returned at the end of 1608. There he had been employed as court painter to Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua (1562-1612), for whom he acted as a diplomatic courier to King Philip III of Spain (1578-1621) in 1603. Beside his study of classical and Italian art, he executed large-scale altarpieces in Rome, Mantua and Genoa.

The archducal sovereigns of the Spanish Netherlands appointed him their court painter in 1609; the following year he married Isabella Brant (1591-1626) with whom he had three children. His reputation and clientele became international; after completing the decoration (destroyed) of the aisles and galleries of the Antwerp Jesuit Church, he was commissioned by Marie de Médicis, Queen Mother of France, to paint a cycle of her life (Musée du Louvre) and that of her deceased husband (never completed) for her Luxembourg Palace in Paris. In the 1630s he painted a cycle for the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall in London (in situ) for King Charles I of Great Britain; for the city of Antwerp, he designed the decorations for the Cardinal-Infante’s Joyous Entry into Antwerp and for King Philip IV of Spain, an extensive series (chiefly Museo Nacional del Prado) for the Torre de la Parada, near Madrid. He was ennobled by Philip IV in 1624 and knighted by Charles I in 1630.

Rubens’s public service (conducted in secret early on) for the archduchess began in the early 1620s and became increasingly important. Following a visit to Madrid, he was engaged in high-level diplomatic negotiations in London in 1629-30. Having attended the exiled Dowager Queen Marie de Médicis in the southern Netherlands he largely retired from such service in 1632, two years after his second marriage to Helena Fourment, with whom he had five children.

REFERENCES
C. Ruelens and M. Rooses (eds.), Correspondance de Rubens et documents epistolaires concernant sa vie et ses oeuvres, 6 vols., Antwerp 1887-1909; M. Rooses, L’oeuvre de P.P. Rubens. Histoire et description de ses tableaux et dessins, 5 vols., Antwerp 1886-92; R.S. Magurn, The Letters of Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Cambridge 1955; Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard in 29 parts and multiple volumes of which the last are forthcoming, 1968-; M. Jaffé, Rubens. Catalogo Completo, Milan 1989; J.S. Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: A Critical Catalogue, 2 vols., Princeton 1980

Entry

The sitter, Doña Ana Maria Mauricia (1601-1666), Infanta of Spain and Portugal and Archduchess of Austria, was the daughter of King Philip III of Spain and Margaret, Archduchess of Austria, sister of the Emperor, Ferdinand II. Anne (in the French and English spelling) married King Louis XIII of France in 1615, and was commonly referred to thereafter as ‘Anne d’Autriche’. She did not bear a child – the future Louis XIV – until 1638. In 1643, she became Regent of France until Louis attained his majority in 1651. The identification of the sitter is discussed below.

The appearance of the queen, depicted here as a young woman, is borne out by the description in the memoirs of her then companion Françoise Langlois de Motteville:

‘At the time when I was sent away [1627] she wore her hair in the fashion of a round coiffure, transparently frizzed, and with much powder; after that she took to curls. Her hair had grown rather darker in colour, and she had a great quantity of it. Her features were not delicate, having even the defect of too thick a nose, and she wore, in the Spanish fashion, too much rouge; but she was fair, and never was there a finer skin than hers. Her eyes were perfectly beautiful; gentleness and majesty united in them; their colour, mingled with green, and her glance the more vivid and full of all the charms that Nature gave them. Her mouth was small and rosy, the smile admirable, and the lips had only enough of the Austrian family to make them more beautiful than many that claimed to be more perfect. The shape of her face was handsome and the forehead well made. Her hands and arms were of surpassing beauty, and all Europe has heard their praises; their whiteness, without exaggeration, equalled that of snow; poets could not say enough when they wished to praise them. Her bust was very fine, without being quite perfect. She was tall, and her bearing lofty but not haughty. She had great charm in the expression of her face, and her beauty imprinted in the hearts of those who saw her a tenderness which did not lack the accompaniment of veneration and respect. Besides these perfections, she had the piety of her mother Queen Marguerite of Austria.’⁷F. Langlois de Motteville, Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and her Court, translated by K.P. Wormeley, 2 vols., London 1902, I, pp. 42-43. It is noteworthy that attention is drawn in the portrait to the whiteness of the sitter’s arms and hands.

The queen could have sat to Peter Paul Rubens only when the artist was in Paris: first from circa 11 January to circa 26 February 1622, during his negotiations with the Dowager Queen Marie de Médicis to decorate two galleries in her Luxembourg Palace, about which Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc wrote from Paris 14 April 1622; second between early May and the end of June 1623 when he delivered the first tranche of the cycle of paintings for Marie de Médicis; and third from March to May 1625, when he supervised the installation of pictures in the first gallery in the Luxembourg Palace and participated in the festivities celebrating the wedding by proxy of Louis XIII’s sister, Henrietta-Maria, to King Charles I of Great Britain. Rubens later passed through Paris secretly in early September 1628 on his way to Madrid, and fleetingly on his return to Antwerp in May 1629.⁸See M. Jaffé, Rubens. Catalogo Completo, Milan 1989, pp. 122-23, 126, 133.

There has not been unanimity over the status of the Rijksmuseum portrait, which is closely related to that in the Louvre,⁹F. Huemer, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIX (1): Portraits, Brussels/London/New York 1977, under no. 3; A. Brejon de Lavergnée et al., Catalogue sommaire illustré des peintures du Musée du Louvre, I: Écoles flamande et hollandaise, Paris 1979, p. 121, inv. no. 1794. from which it differs most notably in the architectural background, and its placement, in the nosegay and in the presentation of the sitter who is here depicted in larger format. While Jaffé excluded both pictures from his catalogue raisonné of 1989 and Glück believed both were copies of a lost original,¹⁰G. Glück, Rubens Van Dyck und ihr Kreis, (L. Burchard and R. Eigenburger (eds.), G. Glück, Gesammelte Aufsätz) Vienna 1933, pp. 319ff. most authorities, following Rooses, have preferred the Louvre version.¹¹M. Rooses, L’oeuvre de P.P. Rubens. Histoire et description de ses tableaux et dessins, 5 vols., Antwerp 1886-92, IV, no. 886. However, Burchard favoured the Rijksmuseum picture;¹²Burchard Documentation, Rubenianum, Antwerp. his view was followed by Huemer in her volume of the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard.¹³F. Huemer, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIX (1): Portraits, Brussels/London/New York 1977, no. 3. This favoured status, recently reaffirmed by Van Hout¹⁴Van Hout described the jewelled headband as a ‘wreath of spiky leaves’, in N. van Hout, Flemish Masters: Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens and their Contemporaries, Amsterdam/Zwolle 2002, pp. 15-18. – that the face was reworked by Rubens – is likely as not to be too generous. The competing claims of the two portraits were settled in 2017-18 as they were hung side by side in the Musée du Luxembourg, when it became clear that there was little to choose between them.¹⁵S. Galletti, D. Jacquot, N. Laneyrie-Dagen et al., Rubens, portraits princiers, exh. cat. Paris (Musée du Luxembourg) 2017-18, nos. 42 and 43.

Rooses regarded the Amsterdam portrait as a competent product of the studio; Oldenbourg suggested that it might have been executed there by Justus van Egmont (1602-1674),¹⁶R. Oldenbourg, P.P. Rubens: Des Meisters Gemälde: in 538 Abbildungen (Klassiker der Kunst V), Stuttgart/Berlin 1921, p. 452. who was a member of Rubens’s studio perhaps from circa 1623 to 1628/29 and was later to specialize in portraiture.¹⁷A. Balis, ‘“Fatto da un mio discepolo”: Rubens’s Studio Practices Reviewed’, in T. Nakamura (ed.), Rubens and his Workshop: The ‘Flight of Lot and his Family from Sodom’, Tokyo 1994, pp. 97-127, esp. p. 113. Recently Ost has attributed both the Louvre and Rijksmuseum portraits to Cornelis de Vos (1584-1651), drawing attention to documented examples of De Vos collaborating with Rubens in the 1620s; but none of these works, as opposed to examples in the 1630s, is extant.¹⁸A. Balis, ‘“Fatto da un mio discepolo”: Rubens’s Studio Practices Reviewed’, in T. Nakamura (ed.), Rubens and his Workshop: The ‘Flight of Lot and his Family from Sodom’, Tokyo 1994, pp. 97-127, esp. p. 112; H. Ost, ‘Anna von Österreich und Elisabeth von Frankreich. Zu einigen Porträts von Frans Pourbus d.J., Peter Paul Rubens und Cornelis de Vos’, Jahrbuch der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen in Baden-Württemberg 37 (2000), pp. 57-80, esp. pp. 67-71; also K. van der Stighelen, De portretten van Cornelis de Vos (1584/5-1651). Een kritische catalogus, Brussels 1990, no. D.15. Although a distinct personality – displaying a robust interpretation of Rubens’s manner – seems to attribute both portraits, it seems not convincingly identifiable as that of Cornelis de Vos. Therefore, in our present state of knowledge it is best to attribute both to the studio of Rubens as did Mandrella in the Musée du Luxembourg catalogue.

Although the Louvre portrait was described as depicting Anne of Austria in the Le Brun and Bailly inventories¹⁹F. Engerand, Inventaire des collections da courone, Inventaire des tableaux du roy: rédigé en 1709 et 1710 par Nicolas Bailly publié pour la première fois avec des additions et des notes …, Paris 1899, p. 42. of the collection of Louis XIV, there was no unanimity as to the identity of the sitter and such was also the case concerning the Rijksmuseum version. While alternative identifications – as Marie de Médicis and Infanta Maria Anna, the daughter of Philip III who became the wife of Emperor Ferdinand III – have been ruled out, it has to be said that the sitter does not closely resemble Rubens’s other renderings of Anne of Austria. However, the French royal inventories should be deemed authoritative, especially as both were compiled in the lifetime of the sitter’s son.

Huemer, following Burchard, listed three portrait types of Anne of Austria by Rubens: the three-quarter-length, seated portrait in the Museo Nacional del Prado;²⁰F. Huemer, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIX (1): Portraits, Brussels/London/New York 1977, no. 2. the three-quarter-length standing portrait in the Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena,²¹F. Huemer, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIX (1): Portraits, Brussels/London/New York 1977, no. 22; engraved by C. van der Passe II, published 1623, F.W.H. Hollstein et al., Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 1450-1700, Amsterdam/Roosendaal 1948-, XVI, no. 75. and the present picture (or rather, in the light of the above, both it and the Louvre version). She mistakenly believed that the Norton Simon portrait was the prototype for the engraving published by Soutman.²²F. Huemer, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIX (1): Portraits, Brussels/London/New York 1977, fig. 73; engraved by Louys, published by Soutman, F.W.H. Hollstein et al., Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 1450-1700, Amsterdam/Roosendaal 1948-, XI, no. 106; K. Barrett, Pieter Soutman, Life and Oeuvre, Amsterdam/Philadelphia (Phil.) 2012, p. 216, Pr-107.

According to Huemer the Prado portrait is the earliest, having been painted in Paris in 1622. Along with the Prado Portrait of the Dowager Queen Marie de Médicis, she identified these two with those referred to by Peiresc in a letter to Rubens of 14 April 1622 as having been received by the Archduchess Isabella,²³C. Ruelens and M. Rooses (eds.), Correspondance de Rubens et documents epistolaires concernant sa vie et ses oeuvres, 6 vols., Antwerp 1887-1909, II, p. 381. and later with nos. 166 and 167 in the Specification of works for sale from the artist’s collection after his death.²⁴C. Norris, Review of L. van Puyvelde, ‘La peinture flamande à Rome’, The Burlington Magazine 95 (1953), pp. 107-09, esp. p. 108; J.M. Muller, Rubens: The Artist as Collector, Princeton 1989, p. 124. She placed the Louvre/Rijksmuseum type after the Pasadena portrait, which can be dated to 1623 by virtue of the engraving based on the head and shoulders of its pendant, Louis XIII; she thus implied that the former was executed in Paris in 1625 or was based on a study of the queen made then. In contrast, Rooses dated the Louvre/Rijksmuseum portrait 1620-25 and that in the Prado to 1625. Indeed, the sitter looks younger in the former. Her face also differs in having larger eyes and being more oblong, with a pronounced jaw. However, her hair seems the more powdered and frizzed in the Prado portrait; according to Madame de Motteville, this was the fashion first favoured by the Queen, and she wears black (perhaps in mourning for her father, Philip III, who died in 1621).

The present portrait is on a composite support of three pieces of oak timber from the Baltic area. Only two of the planks can be dated dendrochronologically; analysis of the other two places a possible earliest use of the support from 1623, but more probably from 1629. The latter year is in the middle of Rubens’s sojourn abroad. As it seems very improbable that the portrait dates from after he reopened his Antwerp studio in 1630, a date circa 1628 seems most likely for the painting. Thus it seems likely that both it and the Louvre version are inferior studio derivations of a likeness made by Rubens of the queen in 1625, which is no longer extant, but which was listed in the Specification of works of art for sale from Rubens’s collection after his death: ‘[no.] ‘120 Un pourtrait de la Reyne regnante de France sur fond de bois.’²⁵J.M. Muller, Rubens: The Artist as Collector, Princeton 1989, p. 117. Whether it was also the prototype for the portrait owned by the Duke of Buckingham (d. 1628) – having perhaps been one of the paintings sold by Rubens to the duke in 1626/27 – must remain an open question.²⁶R. Davies, ‘An Inventory of the Duke of Buckingham’s Pictures etc. at York House in 1635’, The Burlington Magazine 10 (1906-07), pp. 376-82, esp. p. 380: ‘In my Lords Closet … Ruben. - The Picture of the French Queen’.

Gordenker has described the costume in which the virago slashed sleeves and the ruff are notable.²⁷E.S. Gordenker, Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) and the Representation of Dress in Seventeenth-Century Portraiture, Turnhout 2001, pp. 30-31. A similar ruff is worn by Madame de Vicq in her portrait by Rubens in the Tel Aviv Museum.²⁸ Sale London (Christie’s), 11 December 1992, no. 56. The sitter there was the wife of Archduchess Isabella’s ambassador to Louis XIII, Henri de Vicq, who was en poste in Paris from at least 1622 to 1628 and whose portrait in the Louvre Rubens painted as a pendant.²⁹A. Brejon de Lavergnée et al., Catalogue sommaire illustré des peintures du Musée du Louvre, I: Écoles flamande et hollandaise, Paris 1979, p. 118, inv. no. 1793. A similar collar but with rounded rather than pointed lobes is depicted in the portrait of Marie de Médicis by Frans Pourbus II (1569-1622) of 1617 in the Prado;³⁰M. Díaz Padrón, Museo del Prado: Catálogo de pinturas, I: Escuela flamenca siglo XVII, 2 vols., Madrid 1975, I, no. 1624, II, p. 156 (left). she wore a similar decorated but fan shaped collar in Pourbus’s portrait of the previous year in the Art Institute of Chicago,³¹Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Picture Collection, Haarlem 1961, p. 360. and the same motif decorated the collar of the duchess of Buckingham in Rubens’s portrait at Dulwich, made in 1625, which was perhaps based on a portrait miniature of the sitter.³²M. Jaffé, Rubens. Catalogo Completo, Milan 1989, no. 789; for the preparatory drawing: A.-M. Logan, Peter Paul Rubens: The Drawings, exh. cat. New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2005, p. 280, note 2, under no. 77.

An unusual feature is the nosegay in the sitter’s right hand; female sitters were sometimes depicted cradling or clasping roses, but a nosegay such as this held by a royal sitter seems unusual if not unprecedented. It is depicted in a manner reminiscent of still lifes by Jan Brueghel I, but is not obviously by a different hand from the rest of the painting.

Rubens’s depictions of the sitter in the Prado and Louvre/Rijksmuseum portraits are distinguished by her informal placing in a rich, pillared and palatial interior of gilded, grey stone. That in the Prado portrait has been identified as the Hall of the Caryatids, designed by Pierre Lescot (c. 1515-1578) in the Louvre.³³F. Huemer, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIX (1): Portraits, Brussels/London/New York 1977, under no. 2. The background of the Rijksmuseum picture has the same prominent pediment supported by three Corinthian capitals with an alcove beyond; more elaborate, but also unlikely to be identifiable is the whereabouts of the archway topped by a sculpted bust of a hero leading to a doorway, in the background of the portrait in the Louvre.

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

F. Huemer, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, XIX (1): Portraits, Brussels/London/New York 1977, no. 3

Collection catalogues

1885, p. 107, no. 209 (as after Rubens depicting Marie de Médicis); 1887, p. 145, no. 1224 (as a portrait of Anna Maria, Archduchess of Austria, wife of Louis XIII of France); 1903, p. 231, no. 2068 (as a repetition from Rubens’s studio); 1934, p. 250, no. 2068 (as superior to the Louvre version); 1960, p. 269, no. 2068 (as by Rubens and studio); 1976, p. 484, no. C 296 (as by Rubens); 1992, p. 81, no. C 296 (as from the studio of Rubens)

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Anne of Austria (1601-1666), Queen of France, c. 1628', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5319

(accessed 9 May 2025 14:31:37).