1615
oil
panel
From the collection of Art Institute of Chicago
The Holy Family with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist is a 1615 oil by Peter Paul Rubens, a Baroque work, held at Art Institute of Chicago.
You see a warm, crowded scene: Mary sits with baby Jesus on her lap, her breast bare as she nurses him. Joseph, Elizabeth, and young John the Baptist watch with soft expressions. Everyone’s skin glows pink, their bodies round and full. Rubens painted sacred stories like everyday moments. Here, Jesus isn’t just holy—he’s a hungry baby, and Mary feeds him like any mother would. The exposed breast was rare in religious art at the time, a quiet way to show Jesus’s humanity. If you like how Rubens makes holy figures feel real, look up *glazing*—the layering technique he used to make skin look so lifelike.
Peter Paul Rubens’s distinctive blend of fleshy figures and heroic actions dominated the artistic ethos of Antwerp (in present-day Belgium) for much of the 1600s. Here, he translated a sacred subject into vernacular language. The infant Jesus cuddles on the lap of his mother, Mary, whose exposed breast serves as a visual reminder of the human needs of Jesus, also the child of God. Her elderly cousin Elizabeth and Elizabeth’s son, John the Baptist, look on in wonder and awe, and Joseph, Mary’s husband, tends to a lamb, a symbol of Jesus’s eventual self-sacrifice. Notably, not one of these…
Jacques Langlier, Paris, who acquired it in three pieces and had it conserved by the successors to Godefroid before selling it to Antoine Poullain for 24,000 fr [annotation in the copy of the Poullain sale in the Philadelphia Museum of Art; information on this and related annotations in other copies of this sale catalogue were kindly supplied by Burton Fredericksen, email of December 13, 2013 in curatorial file; it was presumably when the three vertical boards were reassembled that a narrow horizontal board was added across the top of the panel]; Antoine Poullain, Paris; sold J. B. P. Lebrun,…
Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum, Loan Exhibition of Forty-Three Paintings by Rubens, and Twenty-Five Paintings by Van Dyck, November 19–December 22, 1946, no. 21. New York, Wildenstein, A Loan Exhibition of Rubens for the Benefit of the Public Education Association, February 20–March 31, 1951, no. 12. Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, "The Holy Family in Art," December, 1985.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Sir Peter Paul Rubens ( ROO-bənz; Dutch: ; 28 June 1577 – 30 May 1640) was a Flemish artist and diplomat.
See the richer artist page
