The Garden of Love. 1769. Copperplate

The picture was born of the artist Peter Paul Rubens’s love for his second wife, the very beautiful Hélène Fourment, who was only 16 years old. The artist has given the gentlemen in the picture his own facial features and the women those of Hélène.
An amorous man is depicted on the one side of the engraving, along with a bashful girl who is being coaxed by Cupid himself. Then, the man tells the woman about the different forms of love – ecstatic, dreamy and motherly love – which are symbolised by the women sitting in the middle of the picture. The lady in the dark dress who is turned toward them is the same girl to whom the man is presenting the explanations and who has already been gripped by a wish to experience it all herself. The couple exiting the Temple of Love in the background are the embodiment of experienced marital happiness; they are acting self-confident and stressing their unity.

Louis-Simon Lempereur (1728–1807) was a French graphic artist who worked in Paris and became famous due primarily to his reproductions of Rubens’s The Garden of Love.
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), who painted the picture on which the engraving was based, was a painter working in Antwerp and one of the principal representatives of the Flemish Baroque.