The term “Rubenesque” suggests richness, plumpness, texture, and vividness. But is it used with an endearing tone? It seems not. The voluptuous beauty celebrated by Rubens in the 17th century clashes with today’s aesthetic preferences, causing discomfort for the modern eye.
Even art curators seek to liberate Rubens from the stereotype of the “Rubenesque.” A recent exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery assembled his paintings of women, attempting to showcase that Rubens was more than just a painter of pink, plump nudes. While his use of color and light infuses vibrancy into his subjects, a closer look reveals a variety in body types, challenging the notion of all women in his paintings as corpulent. For example, there’s Rubens’s tender portrait of his daughter Clara, painted shortly before her passing at the age of 12, or his dramatic portrayal of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus fleeing Bethlehem under the cover of night.
However, the enduring trope of the Rubenesque, originally coined in the 19th century to positively describe a curvy or voluptuous woman, persists because it reflects broader shifts in societal attitudes towards women’s bodies over the past century.
Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking work, “The Feminine Mystique,” published in 1963, illuminated the discontent of post-war American women, often suburban and white. The era saw magazines transition from Rosie the Riveter to the plea of “give us back our wives and sweethearts,” urging women to leave munitions factories and reintegrate returning soldiers into civilian jobs. Friedan labeled this societal unease as “the problem that has no name.”
As women returned to domestic life, their roles were redefined, despite many engaging in professions such as teaching, science, caregiving, cooking, and hairstyling. The media propagated a new image of women under the label of the feminine.
This portrayal of domesticity, encompassing housework, childcare, emotional nurturing, and family management, also included the marketing of beauty. Beauty was presented as a distraction from the daily grind of household chores and caregiving, showcasing sexually alluring bodies for husbands once the children were in bed. In this historic period, female sexuality was epitomized by figures like Marilyn Monroe, Lena Horne, Sophia Loren, Jayne Mansfield, Elizabeth Taylor, and Diahann Carroll. These women were deemed gorgeous, luscious, and, even if some couldn’t achieve such fullness naturally, weight gain tablets, padded bras, and corsets were readily available to sculpt their bodies into the desired voluptuous shape.
As women continued to be depicted as sex symbols while being tethered to the home, their representation clashed with the burgeoning sexual revolution of the late 1960s. Amid movements such as Black Power, the Student Movement, the Hippie revolution against consumerism, and protests against the Vietnam War, a global movement for women’s liberation emerged.
Second Wave feminism aimed to challenge societal norms regarding women’s limited roles and appearances. The disruption of the Miss World Contest in 1970, where feminist activists flour-bombed the host at the Royal Albert Hall, was a visible testament to this resistance. However, as women rebelled against postwar femininity norms, they were presented with a new narrative that marketed the female form as slim, slimmer, slimmest. The era of Twiggy ushered in a visual shift, implying new freedoms and paradoxically suggesting not taking up too much space. Virginia Slims cigarettes encapsulated the ethos – you can be out there, but be sleek, slender, one size, and one look.
Whatever women were doing, they were encouraged to view themselves with a critical inner eye, to evaluate their appearance, their movements and how to convey the coming of sexual freedom with apparent nonchalance. The trouble was, many women neither felt nonchalant, nor could see their bodies fitting in. Women of a certain size felt excluded and judged. They embraced the pill for sure, but many came to feel themselves outsize, in the wrong decade. They couldn’t get their bodies to be the bodies that were represented on billboards and in magazines. The allure of the easy swinging Sixties escaped them and they entered adult life with a feeling of inhabiting the wrong kind of body. A body that needed to be taken in hand and disciplined. A body that needed to be worked on. A body that should be “perfected”.
Thus, the idea of the Rubenesque was reborn with a sigh, with a sense of regret and failure, and evocative of a lost age: an earlier epoch in which larger, voluptuous women’s bodies were adored and celebrated.
The digital revolution has renewed the idea of the Rubenesque. While lighting tricks, face enhancements, make-up adjusters and so on are built into apps and every girl pretty much knows how to shape her image on screen, not everyone uses those filters and transformers. They don’t want the disjuncture of a two-body problem – the one they actually inhabit and the confected one on screen. The disguise is too jangly and unreliable. Instead, they have reached for something pre-modern, daring to call themselves Rubenesque in an attempt to extend the remit of beauty to their bodies, too. A cursory look on TikTok or Instagram reveals posts of pride and defiance by and of ample women. Women display their large bodies in alluring ways while in other posts, men talk to camera of adoring “their” Rubenesque women while bemoaning their partners’ self-criticism that they aren’t svelte enough.
In the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s selection of Rubens’s work, we see pictures of the cherubic, the saintly, of Venus and of noble women. The devoted and angelic figures are often studies in nude while the nursing mother is semi-revealed. We read the wealth of the noblewomen from the richness of their clothes. Size per se was not such a determinant of wealth. Certainly, being well nourished and gorgeously attired was a prerogative, but it wasn’t necessarily attached to a specific body shape. When we look at Rubens’s portraits of noblewomen in the Dulwich show – for instance, his impressive picture of the Genoese Marchesa Maria Serra Pallavicino, clothed in white satin – it is their affluence and power (rather than ample proportions) that we see.
But despite some women’s attempts to reclaim the Rubenesque body – and indeed despite women’s struggles to be taken seriously whatever their size today – they remain a minority view. Our contemporary picture of femininity remains a narrow representation of form. We make unconscious judgements before we even know we are doing so. Our eyes are still trained to appreciate thin and slender bodies, while to be large continues to be derided, pitied, scorned, and depending on one’s social location, to be discriminated against. Size has come to be regarded as something an individual can control. And variation, particularly of the ample sort, is deemed a moral failing. The body is judged as a calling card and signal as to how one is to be seen and valued.
Over the past century, then, ever since women endeavoured to claim more nuanced and varied social and work spaces, there has been a curious shrinkage of body types – their range slimmed down both in reality and desire. Is this a coincidence? If it was an accident of the freedom proclaimed by the sexual revolution, why has it predominated? And how does this look, the look of thinness twinned with elegance, nonchalance, belonging, and confidence come to rule all others? Where once how the body was covered was a sufficient signal (and remains so in some cultures) today it is the shape that indicates place and entitlement.
Bodies are now a site for aspiration. Not just women’s bodies but all bodies endeavouring to enter modernity. Globalism has ushered in a culture of conformity, no matter that we come in different sizes, shapes and ethnicities.
Just a few years after televisions arrived in Fiji – in the mid-1990s – playing such serials as Friends, 11.3 per cent of teenage girls were over the toilet throwing up in an attempt to match the westernised bodies they saw on their screens. These young women did not see this as oppressive in any way. Rather, such actions were manifestations of progress, of taking power, of entering into modernity.
In Seoul, the trend toward Westernized eyelid surgery finds favor among parents seeking to enhance the appearance of their 16-year-old daughters. Jaw shaving has similarly become a routine procedure, altering the facial contours of young South Koreans. Meanwhile, in Brazil, the coveted hourglass figure, long revered as a symbol of beauty, is now “improved” through breast implants, as Barbie emerges as a new archetype of femininity. In the bustling metropolises of China, individuals resort to breaking and resetting their legs, inserting rods to achieve a Western height ideal for both women and men. Surgeries like nose reshaping in Iran and Arabia are embraced as fashionable statements, erasing traces of body diversity as the allure of globalization promises conformity in new and evolving forms.
Interestingly, this transformation of the human body to conform to a narrow aesthetic unfolds in a historical era where our physicality is increasingly detached from the act of creating tangible goods. Industrialization, the internet, and the rise of artificial intelligence have ushered in an age of robotic and virtual bodies, with prosthetics and personalized therapies emerging as remedies for our aging physiques.
Rubens, in stark contrast, never pursued such manipulations of the human form. His robust, muscular studies defy contemporary norms and restrictions, celebrated for their unique grace and craftsmanship. At Dulwich, gazing upon his oil sketch of The Three Graces engaged in a graceful dance, we witness bodies pulsating with life, deeply connected to nature and the celestial realm. Rubens captures the majestic, the sensual, the nurturing, and the ethereal—all embodied in magnificent, desired women depicted through radiant, undulating strokes of paint. In an increasingly dematerialized world, the Rubenesque concept holds significance as a poignant reminder of our own living, breathing corporeality.
