It is generally assumed that the person portrayed here is Maria Pijpelincx, Peter Paul Rubens’s mother. This lady was forced to step out of the shadow of her unfaithful husband, Jan Rubens. She had to plead for mercy for him to the family of William of Orange-Nassau. William himself had been the betrayed husband in this affair.

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Maria Pijpelinckx talks:

Today is the night of 8 to 9 May, 1600 and my youngest son is leaving for Italy. He has got his health certificate in his pocket, confirming that he does not suffer from the plague or another infectious disease. I’m proud of him, although things happened in his life that we hadn’t planned at all.

His older brother Jan Baptist, who also liked to paint, made the journey to Italy before him, at a very early age.

The first years of our Peter Paul’s life were marked by the difficult situation, in which our family had to live in Westphalia. We lived in exile in faraway Siegen; it was a kind of open-air prison for my husband, Jan Rubens. Once we had moved to Cologne and our boys could attend school, life was a little easier thanks to my small greengrocer’s shop; I became a “merchant woman running her own commerce/coopvrouwe drijvende heurs seit handel“.

Every now and then we could come to Antwerp; but it was not until the 1st of March, 1587, that our slimmed-down family could finally return to this city after my husband Jan had died.

My son Philip is a brilliant lawyer, he is following in his father’s footsteps.

Peter Paul took a different path; he started off as an attentive pupil in the Latin school of master Verdonck. He also served as a page to Lady de Lalaing in Oudenaarde; the fine manners he learned there, are still of great use to him. But my family needed a real income and that could only be achieved through real work; fortunately, we have plenty of painting studios in our city, where apprentices are welcome. A distant relative, Tobias Verhaecht, was the first to take Peter Paul on. But then I was able to introduce my son to the deans of the Guild of Saint Luke, Adam Van Noort and Otto Van Veen. Van Veen was a learned man and an excellent teacher, as you will see in this tour! He also convinced our boy that there is more to painting than producing luxury products. For all real art lovers, he said, there is only one Promised Land: go to Italy!

The paintings Peter Paul has made here, before he left[1], have remained partly in the family; I have some nice works at home!

Maria Pijpelincx has made up at least four last wills. She died on October 19, 1608. Peter Paul did not return from Italy until December 11. For his mother’s tomb in St. Michael’s Abbey, he donated the painting ‘Gregory the Great, Surrounded by Saints‘; it’s a work he had brought with him from Italy. Today it hangs in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, in Grenoble. Like Rubens’s wives, Maria Pijpelinckx was given a street name, it’s an extension of the street Wapper, close to Rubens House.

[1] Dec. 18, 1606: “But all other paintings that are fine belong to Peter, who made them” (quoted in Rubens House 1990)