Charles the First and Rubens

At the age of twenty-three, Charles, Prince of Wales, possessed a self-portrait by Rubens. Rubens was then forty-six. He had not designed, nor was he to design, any other portrait of himself for a prince. In 1623, when Charles asked him for his own picture, he had finished the big series of Bible stories for the ceiling of the Jesuit Church in Antwerp, and was engaged on the political allegories commissioned by Marie de Medici for the walls of the Luxembourg. These two cycles of decoration established him as the most brilliant and successful painter outside Italy. The portrait that he sent to Charles, with protestations of unworthiness, was not intended solely as a dazzling bid for the important commission that the Stuarts had to offer, the decoration of the Banqueting House ceiling. It was a gracious and genuine tribute to the young man of whom he had written to Valavez, “M. le Prince des Galles est le prince le plus amateur de la peinture qui soit au monde.”