Peter Paul Rubens

     Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish painter from the early seventeenth century known for creating the first Pan-European style of painting, in which he combined Baroque and Italian Renaissance styles. 

     Venus and Adonis by Peter Paul Rubens arrived in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1937 after spending most of its life in private collections. Unlike most of Rubens's paintings, which were engraved within his lifetime, Venus and Adonis was not replicated until the 1920s due to a thick layer of disfiguring varnish, which covered the true beauty of the painting and made art historians believe that the painting was from another period in Rubens's career. Instead, Venus and Adonis came from his late period, widely considered to be his best.

     This painting was done with looser brushstrokes than his earlier ones. This more impressionistic period often features characters from Greek and Roman myth. The paintings are also full of stories of love and love lost. Rubens had recently married his sixteen-year-old bride, Helena Fourment, and had developed a love for painting her into masterpiecesm, typically as Venus or another symbol of beauty. In Venus and Adonis, it is Helena's face that stares at Adonis in anguish over his fate.