Image source: wikiart.org
Introduction
Peter Paul Rubens’s “Portrait of a Woman, Probably Susanna Lunden,” painted in 1627, is a poised study of presence, intimacy, and style at the cusp of early-seventeenth-century Antwerp society. The sitter turns toward us from a soft, brown atmosphere, her shoulders enveloped in a dark veil whose edge is pricked with gold thread. A single strand of pearls encircles her neck and a glimmer of lace ruffles at each wrist. One hand lifts the veil with a practiced, conversational grace; the other rests across her midriff, steadied by the weight of fabric. The painting is modest in scale, yet it carries the gravity of a life, distilling fashion, character, and psychology into a single, concentrated exchange between viewer and sitter.
Identity, Dating, and the World of the Sitter
The traditional identification of the sitter as Susanna Lunden rests on family connections within the Fourment circle, which would later include Rubens’s second wife, Helena Fourment. Whether or not the attribution is finally secure, the picture certainly belongs to that world of prosperous Antwerp families whose taste for fine textiles, pearls, and portraiture animated the city’s social imagination. The year 1627 locates the work shortly after Rubens’s celebrated portraits of women outdoors and immediately following the Medici commissions in Paris. In this more intimate register, Rubens redirects his public rhetoric into a private mode, using restrained color and finely judged gesture to construct a likeness that feels conversational rather than ceremonial.
Composition and the Choreography of the Pose
Rubens composes the figure in a shallow triangle whose apex is the sitter’s face and whose base is formed by the line of her hands and the gathered fall of the veil. The head tilts slightly to the viewer’s left; the eyes meet us in a steady, unforced gaze. The left hand raises the veil just enough to animate the upper register and to emphasize the gold-trimmed edge, while the right hand gathers fabric lower down, preventing the silhouette from dissolving into darkness. There is no architectural prop and no window to the outside. Everything that matters—identity, mood, tact—is carried by the face and by a choreography of cloth and hands that signals cultivated ease.
Costume, Veil, and the Language of Pearls
The dress is a deep, cool black that drinks light with velvet softness. Over it, the veil pours like smoke, edged with delicate gold work that encloses the head in a diadem of modest luxury. Black in this period signified not only sobriety but also expense; the most saturated dyes required costly processes, and such fabric proclaimed status with quiet confidence. The single strand of pearls is perfectly judged. Pearls were prized for connoting chastity, constancy, and taste; here, each orb catches a tiny highlight that bounces light into the face. The lace cuffs, articulated with quick, opaque touches, lend a whisper of brightness at the wrists and register the sitter’s refinement without ostentation. The ensemble constructs a portrait of dignity founded on texture rather than glitter.
Light, Color, and the Atmosphere of Nearness
Rubens limits the palette to umbers, blacks, warm creams, and small flickers of gold, extracting richness from very little. Light enters from the left, glazing the forehead, cresting the nose, and pooling in a pearly sheen across the chest before slipping down the folds of the veil. The background is not an empty dark but a breathable brown in which warmer and cooler notes mingle, like air touched by varnished wood. This limited harmony draws the viewer close. The face glows because everything around it has been tuned to receive and reflect its light, and the pearls amplify the effect by catching those same tones and returning them as signals of life.
Brushwork and the Tactility of Materials
Rubens’s handling moves with the material he represents. The veil is painted in long, semi-transparent strokes that imitate the way gauzy fabric both conceals and reveals. The satin or velvet of the bodice is indicated by broader, more saturated passages whose edges dissolve softly into shadow. The lace at the cuffs is created with staccato touches and lifted tips of the brush, small peaks of paint that catch real light and make the threads sparkle. Flesh is built with thin, elastic glazes over a warm ground, and then sealed with precise highlights at the eyelid, nostril, lip, and knuckle. The result is a surface that remains palpably painted while also persuading the senses that cloth, skin, and pearl are present.
Gesture and the Ethics of Self-Presentation
The sitter’s two gestures communicate a great deal while saying very little. The raised hand, pinching the veil between thumb and forefinger, suggests a moment just before or after motion, as if she has lifted the edge to speak and then paused. The lower hand, relaxed but intentional, steadies the drapery and shapes the base of the composition. Together they clarify a character who is contained, courteous, and in control of her own display. She is not the passive object of a gaze but an active participant in a social exchange: she shows herself, and she decides how much to show.
Psychology in a Quiet Key
The face is marked by Rubens’s distinctive mixture of candor and tact. The eyes are lively, the mouth set in a line that flirts with a smile, and a faint flush breathes across the cheek. Rubens resists the porcelain mask of ideal beauty; he records small asymmetries and signs of a life lived. That truthfulness does not diminish charm; it deepens it. We recognize a person who could converse, appraise, and tease. The quiet confidence of her gaze, set within the sober frame of dress, presents a modern charisma founded not on spectacle but on intelligence.
Comparisons with “The Straw Hat” and the Family Circle
When viewed alongside Rubens’s near-contemporary portrait widely known as “The Straw Hat,” often identified with Susanna Lunden as well, this work provides a telling counterpoint. The outdoor portrait radiates daylight and theatrical fashion, with a sweeping plumed hat, red sleeves, and a breezy sky. The present image turns inward. The hat becomes a veil, the sky becomes shadow, the bright sleeve becomes a quiet cuff. Yet the two share the same candid exchange of gaze and the same economy of means through which Rubens builds personality from a handful of elements. Seen together, they map the spectrum of Antwerp elegance from promenade to chamber, from display to intimacy.
The Veil, Mourning, and Social Codes
The dark veil invites associations with widowhood or mourning, and in early modern Antwerp it certainly could operate within that code. But Rubens refuses to let the motif harden into a single meaning. The golden trimming and the sitter’s composed warmth keep the image from becoming a funereal emblem. The veil reads as a versatile sign: modesty, fashion, perhaps a period of loss, but equally a device that frames the face with sculptural dignity. The painter toggles between public symbol and private presence, allowing the viewer to sense both social rule and individual life.
Scale, Intimacy, and the Viewer’s Role
The portrait is designed for close viewing. Its power is strongest at conversation distance, where minute changes of highlight and the softing of edges spring into effect. As you move, the pearls brighten and dim, the under-glazes of the veil breathe, and the lower hand seems to shift slightly as the fabric’s sheen turns. Rubens builds such responsiveness by alternating transparent and opaque layers and by leaving select edges open, so that the air of the room can visually mingle with the air of the painting. The viewer, in other words, completes the work; your proximity brings it fully alive.
Technique, Underpainting, and Workshop Rhythm
Rubens typically began with a warm imprimatura over which he drew the figure in a fluid, brown under-sketch. In this picture, the under-painting likely established the main lights of the face and chest, with the veil massed broadly so he could later pull light from dark using soft scumbles. Assistants in his busy Antwerp workshop might have prepared the ground and blocked portions of the background, but the decisive passages—the physiognomy, the hand lifting the veil, the pearl reflexes—bear the master’s quick confidence. The whole surface obeys a single light and shares a unified tempo of brushwork, evidence of close supervision and personal investment.
Antwerp Taste and the Civic Ideal of Modesty
Beyond an individual likeness, the painting articulates civic ideals. Antwerp’s mercantile elite prized learned piety, polished manners, and a fashionable but disciplined bearing. The single strand of pearls, the dark dress, the measured lace, and the controlled gesture align with that ideal. The portrait thus performs a social function: it circulates an image of what cultivated womanhood looks like in a thriving, Catholic, commercial city. Rubens is not merely recording a face; he is curating a model of comportment that will live on in family rooms and be copied in engravings.
The Sound of Color and the Poise of Silence
One of the work’s subtler pleasures is its acoustic quality. The palette is like a low, warm instrument—viola rather than trumpet. Reds are almost wholly absent; the only “high note” is the tiny gold edge of the veil and the pinpoints on the pearls. This restraint creates a poised silence out of which the sitter’s presence sounds clear. It is Baroque, but in a minor key: movement is internal, energy is concentrated, expression is distilled to glance and hand. The painting shows how Rubens could command grandeur through quietness.
Experience in the Gallery
Seen in person, the painting feels like a breath held and then released. Step back and the sitter’s triangular mass anchors the space; step close and the surface discloses tiny revelations—the way a highlight rides the bead of a pearl, the faint coolness along the jaw, the almost imperceptible open edge where veil meets background. You notice how Rubens keeps the whites of the eyes soft, avoiding chalkiness, and how the mouth is resolved with the fewest possible marks. The longer you stay, the more the figure seems to resume motion; the lifted veil trembles, the lower hand shifts weight, and the gaze warms.
Legacy and the Portrait’s Modernity
The portrait endures because it offers a timeless way to think about representation. It elevates the sitter without devouring her in emblem; it honors fashion while keeping character primary; it invites intimacy without trespass. Later painters—from Van Dyck to Gainsborough and well beyond—learned from this grammar of tact, where form and feeling answer one another. For contemporary viewers, the image models a kind of modern poise: a confidence that does not shout, a beauty that cooperates with shadow, a self that is at home in restraint.
Conclusion
“Portrait of a Woman, Probably Susanna Lunden” is a masterclass in how little is needed to make a likeness breathe. A veil, a strand of pearls, a pair of hands, and a face speaking in its own quiet cadence—Rubens arranges these elements so that fabric and light collaborate with psychology. The painting belongs to a network of family, city, and faith, yet it reads most powerfully as a meeting between two people across time. In the soft gravity of black and pearl, framed by an atmosphere that seems to move with us, the sitter remains present, poised, and profoundly human.