Two Sleeping Children
Peter Paul Rubens (1577 to 1640) · About 1612 to 1613
Two small children lie asleep, their heads together on a cushion, cheeks flushed and mouths slightly open. One has a mop of blond curls and sleeps on its back; the other, in profile, has dropped its head against the first. That is the whole picture. There is no story, no setting, no allegory, just the weight and warmth of sleeping infants painted from life. The models are thought to be Rubens's nephew and niece, the children of his elder brother Philip, and the panel was probably made as a study to be kept in the studio and reused.
Rubens was the busiest painter in Europe when he made this, running a large workshop in Antwerp, and studies like this one were his working capital. Children of exactly this type, plump, rosy and tumbling, appear as angels and putti in dozens of his altarpieces and mythologies. Look at the speed of the brush. The hair is a few flicks of the wrist, the shadow under the chin is a single transparent glaze, and the cheeks are built from opaque pinks scumbled over a warm ground that shows through everywhere. He painted flesh better than anyone, and here you can see how he did it.
The museum bought the panel in 1972, one of its most important purchases after the Matsukata gift, and it is the best loved old master in the collection. Go close and notice the small differences between the two heads: one child sleeps deeply, the other seems about to stir. Then step back and watch the picture become, once again, simply two children asleep.
Did You Know? Rubens reused these two heads for cherubs in later paintings, so the sleeping children of Antwerp have been floating in the skies of altarpieces for four hundred years.
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