Image source: wikiart.org
Introduction
Peter Paul Rubens’s “Susanna Fourment” (1620) is a small miracle of immediacy. Executed in the trois-crayons manner—black, red, and white chalk on toned paper—the portrait catches a young woman mid-breath, her mouth softening into a half-smile, her eyes alive with curiosity. Nothing here feels staged or ceremonious. Instead, Rubens transforms a quick encounter into a sustained presence, proving how a handful of lines and flickers of color can carry the same persuasive force as his grandest canvases. The drawing is intimate yet authoritative, modern in its candor yet steeped in the courtly elegance of Antwerp society. It is both likeness and conversation.
Historical Context
Around 1620, Rubens was the preeminent painter of the Southern Netherlands, maintaining a thriving studio in Antwerp while serving patrons across Europe. The Fourment family occupied the city’s mercantile elite as prosperous silk and tapestry dealers. Their circle overlapped with Rubens’s patrons and friends, and a decade later the artist would marry Helena Fourment, making the clan his in-laws. The portrait of Susanna thus emerges from a web of social proximity and mutual esteem. In this context, a chalk likeness functioned as more than a preparatory study; it was a refined gift, a portable token of regard, and often a step toward painted portraits. The choice of chalk allowed for speed and sociability: the sitter did not need to endure long sessions under oil paint, and the artist could modulate tone and color with music-like fluency.
Medium and Technique
The sheet is an exemplar of the trois-crayons technique imported from Italian and French practices and adapted with Northern sensitivity. Rubens uses black chalk for contour and structure, red chalk for warmth in the flesh and lips, and white chalk to ignite the highlights—across the brow, the bridge of the nose, the eyelid rims, the wet sparkle at the eye, and the satiny dashes on the lace collar. The toned paper provides a middle register so light and shadow can pivot without heaviness. Look closely at the neck: a light gray haze maps the turning cylinder; darker hatching tucks under the jaw; a small, firm accent locates the corner of the mouth. The hair, braided and pinned, is drawn with elastic strokes that alternate between soft mass and quick, wiry definition. Nothing is overworked. Rubens leaves passages suggestive—the shoulder dissolving into the paper, the ear indicated with a few decisive touches—trusting the viewer to complete the form.
Composition and Cropping
Rubens crops the figure close, cutting at the shoulder and collar so the head fills the sheet without feeling cramped. The pose is three-quarter, a turn that offers both the architecture of the skull and the lively asymmetry of the features. Susanna’s gaze slips toward the viewer’s left, implicating someone just outside the frame; her mouth gathers into a smile that could bloom or vanish. The diagonal of the open collar, the lift of the braid, and the tilt of the head create a gentle triangle that stabilizes the design. Negative space around the cranium breathes; the background remains a warm field with the faintest atmospheric rub, keeping all attention on the sitter’s face.
Light and the Drama of Modesty
Light falls from the upper left, glazing the forehead and cheekbone, then fading into a cool shadow beneath the right eye and along the jaw. The modulation is tender. Rather than Caravaggist theaters of dark and blaze, Rubens favors an enveloping glow that feels like daylight filtered through a window. White chalk is used sparingly—never as frosting but as vapor that condenses at points of greatest humidity: the eyes, the tip of the nose, the moist inner lip. This staging of light leads to a specific emotional tone. The portrait reads as modest—no ostentatious pearls or velvets—but the illumination dignifies every surface it touches, suggesting a person whose worth is inherent rather than advertised.
Color as Flesh and Character
The red chalk is a quiet protagonist. Rubens feathers it into the cheeks and lays it more decisively along the lips, then lets it whisper in the ear and the braided ribbon. These warm notes counter the coolness of the paper and the sootier black accents in the collar and hair. The result is a face that circulates with life. Color here is not cosmetic; it is physiological and psychological. The slight bloom under the eyes and the quick red at the mouth communicate alertness and wit. Even the hint of coral in the earring, barely indicated, extends this warmth downward, knitting the head to the costume.
Costume, Status, and Social Code
Susanna’s dress is sketched rather than catalogued, but the essentials register: an upright collar with lace edging, a fine chemise, a bodice suggested by a few orange chalk notations, and the delicate trace of an earring. Antwerp portraits often balanced opulence with propriety; Rubens keeps to that balance while allowing the personality to eclipse the wardrobe. The high collar frames the face like a theatrical proscenium; the lace is not painstakingly enumerated because its role is rhetorical, not archival. It signals refinement and then yields, properly, to the sitter’s expression. This hierarchy—face first, fabric second—belongs to Rubens’s humanist values and to a culture that prized conversation as a social art.
The Psychology of the Gaze
What makes the portrait unforgettable is the negotiation happening in the eyes. They are large, candid, and slightly amused, with upper lids heavy enough to suggest calm rather than naiveté. The glance doesn’t challenge the viewer; it measures the viewer. It is a social gaze in which intelligence keeps pace with charm. Rubens articulates this psychology with small means: a darker line for the upper lid, a softening on the lower, a pinpoint highlight placed just so, and the tiniest compression at the outer corner, implying a smile not yet allowed to spread. Many Baroque portraits perform; this one listens.
Drawing as Performance
Rubens performs as openly as the sitter. His hand moves between registers—calligraphic in the hair, sculptural along the cheekbone, whispering at the throat. A few exploratory lines still ghost under the chin and at the shoulder, pentimenti that record the choreography of decision. The signature at the lower right, compact and unobtrusive, feels like the last note after a fluent aria. The sheet is not a map for later labor but a record of lived perception. You sense the time of making—a brief sitting, the flare of conversation, a moment when light was good—and the artist’s ability to translate that hour into permanence.
Relationship to Painted Portraits
This drawing participates in a broader Rubensian project: to humanize portraiture without diminishing it. In later painted likenesses of Fourment family members, the same liveliness appears under oil—eyes that think, mouths that move, hair that breathes. The chalk sheet anticipates the famous image long associated with Susanna Fourment wearing a broad straw hat: a play between modest attire and radiant personality, between social code and personal spark. In that sense, the drawing acts as a seedbed for painted solutions: how to set warm flesh against a subdued ground, how to let white accents flicker on lace, how to keep a sitter’s wit intact amid studio varnish.
Comparisons and Influences
Rubens knew the portrait drawings of Venetian masters and the crisp chalk studies of Federico Barocci and Annibale Carracci. From them he learned the efficacy of trois-crayons and the elegance of restraint. Yet his handling remains distinct. Where an Italian draughtsman might polish contours to porcelain smoothness, Rubens accepts the grain of the paper as an ally, allowing texture to stand in for breath. Where Northern contemporaries sometimes pressed too hard into descriptive detail, he edits aggressively, making three marks do the work of thirty. The drawing thus occupies a sweet spot between Italian grace and Flemish candor.
The Ethics of Likeness
Portraiture in this period often walked a line between truth and flattery. Rubens’s ethic is recognition—an exactness that is not pedantic. The forehead is high, perhaps higher than fashion preferred; the nose is strong; the eyes are set slightly wide. He does not shave features into conformity. Instead, he amplifies what is unique and attractive in Susanna’s face: her luminous skin, the intelligence in her gaze, the nervous music of her mouth. The result is persuasive without falsifying. It offers the viewer not an icon of beauty but the beauty of a person.
The Poetics of Youth
There is youth here, but not the sweetness of a child. Rubens catches Susanna at the cusp where confidence flowers. The tightly braided hair suggests diligence; the loosened wisps around the temple suggest movement and ease. The half-smile reads as humor under discipline. In the spectrum of Baroque femininity—from the stately matron to the goddess in myth—this drawing stakes a claim for the modern young woman as a subject worthy of serious attention. She is not a cipher in a costume but an individual mind looking out.
Space, Breath, and the Unfinished
One might call the background unfinished, but “unfinished” is the wrong word. The reserved space is part of the design’s breath. It keeps the head from pressing into the paper’s edges and supplies a halo not by inscription but by absence. The few rubbed areas behind the collar introduce a mild turbulence that sets the crisp facial modeling into relief. Rubens understands that drawings can suffocate under too much finish; he defeats that danger by letting paper remain paper where paper best serves the portrait.
Conservation, Condition, and Seeing the Sheet
Chalk drawings are sensitive objects. Over centuries, papers can fox and fade; reds can dim; whites can dull under grime. Yet the essential energies of this sheet endure because Rubens constructed his effects with structure as well as sparkle. The placement of black accents—at nostril, pupil, lash line, and collar—keeps the face legible even if whites soften. In person, one finds that the sheet has a slight sheen where chalk has been pressed and a velvet matte where it lies lightly. The drawing rewards close, respectful looking: the highlight in the left eye resolves into a cluster of tiny particles; the red at the lip shows granulation; the white on the cheek rides high enough to catch raking light.
Meaning for Viewers Today
The appeal of “Susanna Fourment” is immediate because it refuses theatricality. In an age fascinated by celebrity images, this drawing offers the opposite: a private likeness that dignifies attention itself. It models how to look at someone without consuming them, how to record personality without reducing it to type. For students, the sheet teaches economy: which lines matter, how highlights behave, how color temperature builds form on toned paper. For general viewers, it offers companionship across four centuries—the sensation that a real person stood, smiled, and is still available to be met.
How to Look, Step by Step
Start with the eyes and measure the asymmetry of the gaze: one eye a fraction more open than the other, both moist and alert. Drift to the nose and feel how three planes—bridge, side, tip—turn with almost no contour, only temperature shift. Pause at the mouth, where a tiny dark at the corner holds the smile in place. Follow the braid upward and notice how the chalk alternates pressure to simulate hair passing from light to shadow. Finally, step back until the sheet becomes a single, breathing head suspended in pale air. That is the intended harmony: structure resolved, life intact.
Legacy and Afterlives
Rubens’s portrait drawings influenced artists across the Low Countries and beyond. Later seventeenth-century draughtsmen—Van Dyck in particular—absorbed the lesson that chalk could deliver aristocratic polish without freezing the face. Eighteenth-century French pastel portraiture would rediscover the same marriage of immediacy and luxury, with white highlights acting as jewelry for the skin. In modern times, when drawing is sometimes relegated to preparatory status, “Susanna Fourment” stands as a reminder that a sheet can be finished without being overfinished, complete without being closed.
Conclusion
“Susanna Fourment” is a portrait that breathes. Rubens uses three crayons and a field of toned paper to unlock a personality that is bright, poised, and distinctly herself. The sheet demonstrates the artist’s command of structure, light, and color; it also demonstrates his charity as an observer, his refusal to flatten a person into type. In this small work one finds many of the virtues that made Rubens a giant—confidence of hand, warmth of tone, humanist attention—without the rhetoric of scale. The result is a private masterpiece whose quietness magnifies its truth.