In this intriguing image, a group of allegorical figures are gathered around an ornate dining table, a mensa voluptatis, that bears the food of love.

It was painted at a time when Pourbus was working under the protection of his father-in-law Lancelot Blondeel, and must have been important in establishing his name as the leading painter of Bruges until his death in January 1584. 1547 and is his earliest signed work (it is signed in black in the lower right ‘Petrus Pourbus Faciebat’). His involvement in this society of poets and musicians seems to have been key in the creation of our masterpiece.Īn Allegory of True Love is dated to c. He was active in a number of guilds in the city, including the crossbowmen’s guild and one of the city’s two chambers of rhetoric (amateur literary confraternities). He must have been a fully-trained painter when he arrived, since he was admitted shortly afterwards to the Bruges painters’ guild. It is also the only remaining painting of a secular subject in the oeuvre of the artist, who otherwise specialised in Biblical subject matter and portraits.Īccording to an early biographer, Pieter Pourbus was a native of Gouda (in present-day Holland) who moved to Bruges at the age of about twenty. It is one of only two securely-attributed paintings by Pourbus in the national museums of this country -the other being a portrait in the National Galleries of Scotland.

We are particularly fortunate to have such a unique painting in our collection. There is another link to Rubens in the sense that this painting was once interpreted as a garden of love, a subject developed and explored by Rubens himself. His son and grandson were both painters, the latter, Frans Pourbus (1569–1622), was, like Rubens, a court painter to both Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua and the Archdukes Albert and Isabella of the Spanish Netherlands. Pieter Pourbus was the founder of a dynasty of painters from Bruges.

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