A new book by Nick Trend tells the story of art’s greatest love affairs through the artists’ most heartbreaking pictures
Het Pelsken (The Little Fur) by Peter Paul Rubens, c 1637
Rubens’s most intimate portrait. Helena, Rubens’s second wife, is cast, playfully, as Venus, the Goddess of Love.
Rubens has posed her in homage to his great predecessor Titian, who made several paintings of women in fur – and in imitation of Venus Pudica. Derived from classical sculptures, it refers to Venus covering her nakedness.
Yet, instead of hiding her breasts, Helena uses her arm to lift them into prominence, nipples erect.
Beware of Luxury by Jan Steen, c 1663
The moralising is clear in Steen’s larger-scale paintings of chaotic, dysfunctional families, for which he is still famous.
This is a classic example, full of chaos and jeopardy. In a topsy-turvy world, a child smokes a pipe, the dog eats the pie while the matriarch sleeps, and the baby throws his dish onto the floor.
And the flirtatious woman at the centre of it all, holding the wine glass so suggestively? Margriet Steen. Jan is having affectionate fun at his wife’s expense. They had married in Leiden in 1649, when he was 23 and she was probably slightly younger – and also pregnant. They had eight children.
Portrait of Helena de Kay by Winslow Homer, 1872
A red rose was deeply meaningful for the sitter in this portrait, the artist Helena de Kay (1846-1916).
According to her best friend, Mary Hallock, it represented a sort of personal emblem, a symbol of herself. The painting seems to be part of the process by which the artist, Winslow Homer (1836- 1910), came to terms with his unrequited love for her.
When he did this painting, Helena had already met her husband-to-be – publisher Richard Watson Gilder. The painting was made in 1872, when Homer realised his love for her was doomed.
It was a disappointment from which he seems never to have recovered. He lived alone for the rest of his life.
Three Studies for Portrait of George Dyer by Francis Bacon, 1963
‘An artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs,’ said Francis Bacon (1909-92).
And the greatest passion in his life and the greatest source of his despair was George Dyer (1934-71), his lover and model. Three Studies is the first painting Bacon made of him, a couple of months after they met in London in 1963.
Especially in the right-hand portrait, there are aspects of Bacon’s own physiognomy. It is as though the two faces are merging in a sort of spiritual and physical union.
In 1971, Dyer was found dead from an overdose of drink and drugs.
Nude Woman in a Red Armchair by Pablo Picasso, 1932
In 1927, the chance sighting of a beautiful 17-year-old girl in a Paris street proved too tempting for the frustrated 45-year-old artist.
‘I am Picasso,’ he told Marie-Thérèse Walter. ‘I feel we are going to do great things together.’ And they did – in secret.
He did this portrait as their relationship reached its erotic peak. She graces the sinuous lines of this red armchair with voluptuous curves.
Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels by Rembrandt, c 1654-56
Hendrickje was Rembrandt’s maid, lover and mother of his daughter, Cornelia.
The portrait was made as Hendrickje was getting to grips with Rembrandt’s bankruptcy and life with a young child, and yet she radiates a remarkable sense of calmness and poise. There is a delicious tension between her regal demeanour and the erotic charge of the portrait.
The Birthday by Marc Chagall, 1915
Chagall (1887-1985) began The Birthday on his 28th birthday in July 1915. The picture marked his marriage to Bella Rosenfeld (1895-1944) a couple of weeks later.
Marc said of their first meeting in their home town of Vitebsk, Belarus, in 1909, ‘I feel she has known me always – my childhood, my present life, my future – as if she were watching over me, divining my innermost being.’
Few of his many hundreds of pictures and sketches of her could be called portraits. When she appears, often in a dreamlike setting, we know it is her, from her calm, impassive expression and her dark hair.
Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow by Georgia O’Keeffe, 1923
O’Keeffe (1887-1986) made Grey Lines during her relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz. She often focuses on the folds, petals and stamen of a single exotic bloom.
Many of these paintings have been seen as referencing the female anatomy. She was angered and frustrated by what she felt was the reductive approach of many contemporary male critics who focused on what they saw as the sexual connotations of her art. Still, it’s hard not to see some of these paintings as an invitation to intimacy.
What Art Can Tell Us About Love by Nick Trend is out now (£18.99)
