Helena Fourment's Het Pelsken

Abstract

This article focuses on Het Pelsken, a portrait by Peter Paul Rubens depicting his second wife Helena Fourment in a state of undress. It takes its cue from the fact that, for eighteen years of her life, Helena was the undisputed owner of Het Pelsken. The central aim is to give an historically grounded yet nuanced account of Helena's spectatorship in relation to an erotically charged and thus, in the early modern period, potentially troubling image. This, in turn, may function as a starting point for more profound inquiries into how women use their eyes when looking at erotically charged imagery. Margit Thøfner is a lecturer in art history in the School of World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia. She has published articles in the Oxford Art Journal, in the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek and in Emblematica. She has received an AHRB grant to investigate courtly and civic festivals in the Habsburg Netherlands in the early modern period.