The Three Graces

Rubens painted this for himself in the last years of his life, and the Grace on the left is thought to be his young second wife Helena Fourment, whom he married in 1630 when she was sixteen and he was fifty three. The other two may be based on her sisters. Look at the flesh, which is built from thin glazes of red, blue and yellow over a pale ground so that the skin seems lit from within, and at the way the three bodies are linked in a chain of hands, a circle that closes on itself. The palette is bright and clear, the landscape painted with the speed and freshness of Rubens's late style. The roses and the fountain are the only decorations; the bodies do the rest.

The painting stayed in Rubens's house until his death in 1640, when Philip the Fourth of Spain bought it from the estate for the royal collection. In the eighteenth century it was one of the nudes that a prudish king marked for burning, and only the pleas of the court painter saved it; it was locked in a private room with the Titian nudes and later transferred to the Academy before reaching the Prado in 1834. It hangs today among the mythological paintings Rubens made for the Spanish crown.

Did You Know? Charles the Third ordered the painting burnt with other nudes in the royal collection, and it survived only because the painter Anton Raphael Mengs persuaded him to hand it to the Academy instead.