Kirchner's MARZELLA: Highbrow Art or German Teen Porn?

Fig. 1. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Marzella, 1910.
Moderna Museet, Stockholm. (Fig. 1)

In Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Marzella (Fig. 1), the prepubescent nymphet is sans fountains. Consequently, Sherwin Simmons wrote in the paper ''A suggestiveness that can make one crazy': Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Images of Marzella" published in Modernism/modernity that not being able to determine the naked model’s maturity is discomforting  - especially when one gets the impression that 14-year-old Marzella is exuding a "sexual desire".

Fig. 2. Kirchner's 1st Drawing of Marzella

Altonaer Museum, Hamburg 

Kirchner, the German expressionist painter and printmaker, wrote in a letter to Erich Heckel, the German painter and printmaker, that Marzella "shows fine features", that he and the nymphet "play", and that she had an insane "suggestiveness":

Marzella has now become completely at home and shows fine features. We have become very familiar; we lie on the carpet and play. There is great charm in such a pure female, a suggestiveness that can make one crazy. More so than in the older girls. Freer, but without anything of the consummate female being lost. 

Marzella and other nymphets like Marzella's 12-year-old friend and her 15-year-old sister were able: "[...] to roller skate and bike naked through the artists’ rooms."

Senta, a 13-year-old with “marvelous conical breasts”, was another patron of Kirchner's studio. On at least one occasion, after stripping, she sat next to Marzella:

Senta comes and strips. I greet her so that the darling feels in my complete possession. How these two cats look each other over, I frantically try to start a conversation. They carefully pay attention to each other. “How do you like Senta?” Good, I leave the two alone for a moment. Then the friendship is ready. We are together until 7:30 pm.

Fig. 3. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Fränzi on a Sofa, 1909–10.
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Simmons related that 8-years-old Lina Franziska (Fränzi) Fehrmann was Kirchner's youngest model. In Kirchner's Erich Heckel and Fränzi on a Sofa, Fränzi poses on Heckel’s lap. Consequently, Simmons suggested: [...] the naked bodies of girl and artist come into intimate contact [...]" (Fig. 3). Unsurprisingly, the painting raised some eyebrows at a 2010 exhibition organized by Hannover’s Sprengel Museum and Halle’s Moritzburg Stiftung.

Fig. 4. Erich Heckel, Girl with Doll (Fränzi) 
Neue Galerie New York

Simmons wrote that in Heckel’s Girl with Doll (Fränzi) (Fig. 4), Fränzi's (partially) nude pose can be: "[...] associated with Venuses, courtesans, and prostitutes." However, the skirt of Fränzi's doll: "[...] partially covers the girl’s slim thigh, with its right edge both shaping the pubis and concealing the genitals." Ironically, Simmons wrote that: "Heckel appears to use the doll as a sign of innocent childhood [...]"

In a postcard that Kirchner sent to Heckel (Fig. 5), Marzella is posing on a bed, but her hands are hiding her sex. Simmons stated: "[...] suggesting an awareness of the gaze’s ultimate object [...]", which is a pose that Simmons related is related to Edvard Munch’s Puberty where Munch's nymphet is exuding her: "[...] awakening female sexuality that was 'both vulnerable and defiant, fragile in a confused state.'"

Fig. 6. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
Illustration for Frank Wedekind’s Mine-Haha

Simmons shared that a number of Kirchner's drawings referenced Wedekind and Wedekind’s Mine-Haha; or, On the Bodily Education of Young Girls, which Kirchner illustrated. For example, in one drawing (Fig. 6), Kirchner illustrated a scene from The Gnat Prince, the second act of a play performed in the book. In the act, the prince, played by a nymphet, undressed "[...] one of a series of girls whom “he” guided to bed [...]". Subsequently: "[...] the cast circles a copulating couple in bed while walking on their hands, thus exposing their genitals to the audience’s gaze [...]"

Fig. 7. Ernst Kirchner, Drawing in Sketchbook 8

In a drawing from Kirchner's Sketchbook 8 (Fig. 7), Marzella is posing, with her legs spread and genitals featured, on a “Cam-eroon chair” that Simmons interprets as move: "[...] from an association with the softer exoticism of Japonisme to the harder primitivism of Africa."

Fig. 8. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, KG Brücke in Galerie Arnold.
Exhibition Poster

In a woodcut, which was made to illustrate an exhibition poster (Fig. 8), Simmons explained that "Marzella’s immaturity is accentuated by the thinness of her arms [...]". And that the fetus which Marzella appears to be holding, illustrates the nymphets "sexual/procreative potential" as a child bride. 

Lastly, we're always intrigued by how some of the most controversial art is possessed by displayed in some of the most distinguished cultural institutions around the world. For example, Moderna Museet's Marzella, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art's (i.e., Cornell University's) Erich Heckel and Fränzi on a Sofa, and the National Gallery's Puberty.

Lovis Corinth's "Self-Portrait with his [Topless Young] Wife and a Glass of Champagne" (1902)

"Self-Portrait with his Wife and a Glass of Champagne" (1902)

In 1901, Lovis Corinth, the German artist and writer, opened an all-girls private art school. Days later, 41-year-old Lovis fell in love with his very first student - 21-year-old Charlotte Berend whom he subsequently married after he painted her topless in Self-Portrait with his Wife and a Glass of Champagne (1902).

In the double-portrait, Charlotte is sitting on Lovis’ lap. Her left arm is wrapped around his neck while she’s holding the stem of a flower in her left hand. 

Lovis embraces Charlotte's right fountain with his left hand, but he pointedly allows her spout to peek through his index and middle finger as he raises a celebratory glass of red champagne with his left. 

Interestingly, Lovis highlighted Charlotte’s nude upper body while his fulfilled face posed in Charlotte’s shadow. 

Of the painting, Charlotte related in her memoir that Lovis got “great pleasure” from the painting: 

Lovis asked me: 'Would you like to give me great pleasure? When he was sure I agreed, he continued: 'I have long dreamed of painting a double portrait of us, you as a semi-nude! [...] He was jubilant as he worked, he was cheerful and exclaimed: 'I want to paint it as it makes me happy [...] He painted for a few hours and completed our heads and, like him, I could hardly wait for the next day so that he could continue painting.

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Oval Portrait": An Enthralling Young Bride

Chelsea Hodson made a reference to Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie (1962) in Tonight I'm Someone. And Godard made a reference to Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Oval Portrait". 

Here's the Wikipedia plot summary:

The tale begins with an injured narrator [...] seeking refuge in an abandoned mansion in the Apennines. The narrator spends their time admiring the paintings that decorate the strangely shaped room and perusing a volume, found upon a pillow, that describes them.

Upon moving the candle closer to the book, the narrator immediately discovers a before-unnoticed painting depicting the head and shoulders of a young girl. The picture inexplicably enthralls the narrator "for an hour perhaps" [...] The narrator eagerly consults the book for an explanation of the picture [...]

The book describes a tragic story involving a young maiden of "the rarest beauty". She loved and wedded an eccentric painter who cared more about his work than anything else in the world, including his wife.

The painter eventually asked his wife to sit for him, and she obediently consented, sitting "meekly for many weeks" in his turret chamber.

The painter worked so diligently at his task that he did not recognize his wife's fading health, as she, being a loving wife, continually "smiled on and still on, uncomplainingly".

As the painter neared the end of his work, he let no one enter the turret chamber and rarely took his eyes off the canvas, even to watch his wife.

After "many weeks had passed," he finally finished his work. As he looked on the completed image, however, he felt appalled, as he exclaimed, "This is indeed Life itself!" Thereafter, he turned suddenly to regard his bride and discovered [...]

And here's a link to the short story.

Paul Gauguin: "An Artist Who Had Sex With Teenage Girls"

Farah Nayeri wrote in the New York Times Arts section article (November 18, 2019) "Is It Time Gauguin Got Canceled?: Museums are reassessing the legacy of an artist who had sex with teenage girls and called the Polynesian people he painted “savages.”":

“Is it time to stop looking at [Paul] Gauguin altogether?”

That’s the startling question visitors hear on the audio guide as they walk through the “Gauguin Portraits” exhibition at the National Gallery in London. The show, which runs through Jan. 26, [2019] focuses on Paul Gauguin’s depictions of himself, his friends and fellow artists, and of the children he fathered and the young girls he lived with in Tahiti.

The standout portrait in the exhibition is “Tehamana Has Many Parents” (1893). It pictures Gauguin’s teenage lover, holding a fan.

The artist “repeatedly entered into sexual relations with young girls, ‘marrying’ two of them and fathering children,” reads the wall text. “Gauguin undoubtedly exploited his position as a privileged Westerner to make the most of the sexual freedoms available to him.”

Born in Paris [...] He took up painting in his 20s, while working as a stockbroker, a profession he would soon give up — along with his wife and children — to make art full time. He set sail for Tahiti in 1891 [...] Gauguin spent most of the 12 remaining years of his life in Tahiti and on the French Polynesian island of Hiva Oa, cohabiting with adolescent girls, fathering more children, and producing his best-known paintings.

[Unsurprisingly] [i]n the international museum world, Gauguin is a box-office hit. There have been a half-dozen exhibitions of his work in the last few years alone, including important shows in Paris, Chicago and San Francisco.

Nine labels were changed to avoid culturally insensitive language, according to the museum’s press office [...] [For example] his “relationship with a young Tahitian woman” was changed to “his relationship with a 13- or 14-year-old Tahitian girl.”

[...] out of 2,313 feedback cards submitted by visitors at the Canadian exhibition, [only] about 50 were complaints about Gauguin and about the museum programming.

Famous Ephebophile: Pablo Picasso's Teen Mistress & Sexual Affair

Marie-Thérèse and Pablo Picasso

In a March 2018 piece in The Guardian, "Muse, lover, lifeblood: how my grandmother woke the genius in Picasso", Olivier Widmaier Picasso wrote about his grandmother, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and her "secret life" with Picasso. 

Olivier shared how his grandparents met:

On Saturday 8 January 1927, in the late afternoon, my [married 45-year-old] grandfather noticed a young woman [17-year-old Thérèse Walter] through the window of the Galeries Lafayette in Paris. He waited until she came out, then greeted her with a big smile. 

“Mademoiselle, you have an interesting face. I would like to paint your portrait.” He added: “I’m sure we shall do great things together. I’m Picasso.”

 "[...] I found him charming.” [Consequently] Marie-Thérèse kept the appointment [...] They started a conversation which was renewed every day [...] Meanwhile, he drew Marie-Thérèse frenziedly.

[17-year-old] Marie-Thérèse coiffée d'un béret, 1927

“[Due to Picasso's marriage to Olga] [m]y life with him was always secret,” Marie-Thérèse said. “Calm and peaceful. We said nothing to anyone. We were happy like that, and we did not ask anything more.” 

This “Marie-Thérèse period” generated drawings and engravings of exceptional force [...] This would give rise to busts, imposing heads of women and a series of portraits that Marie-Thérèse illuminates with her blond hair – it includes The Dream

Pablo Picasso The Dream (Le Rêve) 1932

In the summer of 1933, the family went to Cannes, and then to Barcelona. But the storm was brewing. Pablo got Marie-Thérèse to come in secret and installed her in a nearby hotel. And once back in Paris, he started, for the first time, to investigate the possibility of divorce [...] as divorce was now permitted by the recently established Spanish Republic. “And then one day I found I was pregnant,” Marie-Thérèse would later recount.

(The divorce never happened due to Olga's objection and after the Spanish civil war, Franco re-abolished of divorce.)

[...] in September 1939, Marie-Thérèse and [her daughter] Maya were on holiday in Royan, north of Bordeaux, and stayed there until the spring of 1941. Picasso concealed from Marie-Thérèse the existence of Dora Maar, a photographer and his mistress since the summer of 1936. He arranged for my grandmother and their daughter to return to Paris, to a flat on Île Saint-Louis. My grandparents’ relationship had now lasted 14 years. 

Hannah Furness wrote in The Telegraph piece "Picasso's muses: artist's own collection starring six women he loved on sale for the first time" that Marie-Thérèse hung herself four years after Picasso's death. 

Balthus' THE STREET: A Nymphet's Crotch Groped Before & After the MoMA

Balthus' The Street: Before (1933) and After (1955) the MoMA

We're reading Weber's Balthus: A Biography in preparation of the second edition of Nymphalis Carmen: Nympholepsy in Nabokov’s Oeuvre. 

We asked and answered the following question in Nymphalis Carmen:

And who was one of Nabokov's favorite painters? Based on my leading question, you may have been able to guess that it is none other than Balthasar Klossowski de Rola or simply Balthus. Nabokov shared in Strong Opinions: 

"The aspects of Picasso that I emphatically dislike are the sloppy products of his old age. I also loathe old Matisse. A contemporary artist I do admire very much, though not only because he paints Lolita-like creatures, is Balthus." (167) 

And Balthus shared, translated into English, in the documentary Balthus the Painter (1996), referring to Nabokov: “I think we feel the same thing in the presence of young girls.”

In addition, we've blogged about Balthus in the past. For example, we wrote about how, despite over 8,000 virtual signatures on an (online) petition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art refused to removed Balthus' Thérèse Dreaming (1938). But I didn't realize that The Street (1933), which I've passed several times at the MoMA, had a previous - even more salacious version. 

Here's MoMA's description of The Street:

The Street, Balthus's first large painting, was one of several that scandalized audiences when it was included in the artist's earliest solo exhibition, in Paris in 1934. Balthus rendered each of the figures in his scene of Paris's rue Bourbon-le-Chateau frozen mid-movement; none of them seem to notice the aggressive sexual struggle underway at the painting's far left [...] The Street was of great interest to Surrealist artists for its rendering of a crowded street as an uncanny site of mental isolation and for its exploration of sexual taboos.

Intriguingly, the art history major who wrote that blurb didn't mention that The Street was modified by Balthus in 1955 at the request of James Thrall Soby. 

Here's a summary of Weber's writing on the history of The Street:

Soby, whose taste in art was "bold enough to confront the formidable", purchased The Street in Paris in 1936 and promptly placed it on a wall in his Farmington, Connecticut home. Soby admitted that The Street hadn't sold in three years due to "[...] the depiction of the young man at the edge of ecstasy reaching over the hem of the girl's hiked-up skirt toward the young girl's genitals."

Soby was "delighted in the shock value" of The Street, he had "a lively sense of humor", "a deep pleasure in upsetting the bourgeoisie" and "[h]e was keyed up by - in his own words - the "young girl being seized by the crotch [...]"

However, Soby didn't anticipate that his five-year-old step-son and his playmates would "[...] titter wildly over The Street." Consequently, Soby placed the painting in a fireproof vault. 

However, in 1955, after Reverend James L. McLane, who ironically hung some of Balthus' "most provocative" paintings of nymphets in his church in Los Angeles, "bawled [him] out for three hours for being so cowardly as to hide a great painting away in a darkened vault", Soby exhibited and bequeathed the painting to the MoMA after it had been modified by Balthus. "[...] the Mongolian boy's hand had been moved very slightly to a less committed position on the young girl's body, though his eyes were tense with the same fever."

The Street has been exhibited in the MoMA at least eight times. Here are three examples:

 "Balthus." December 19, 1956–February 3, 1957

 "Selections from the Collections, Photography, Painting and Sculpture, Architecture and Design"
March 8, 1982–February/March 1983

 "The James Thrall Soby Bequest" March 22, 1979–May 9, 1979

The Met Breuer, Egon Schiele & Nude Teen Watercolors

We went to The Met Breuer to see three Egon Schiele pieces that are exhibited in the Obsession: Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso from the Scofield Thayer Collection. 

Here's an excerpt from The Met Breuer's Exhibition Overview:

This exhibition at The Met Breuer presents a selection of some fifty works from The Met's Scofield Thayer Collection—a collection that is best known for paintings by artists of the school of Paris, and a brilliant group of erotic and evocative watercolors, drawings, and prints by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Pablo Picasso, whose subjects, except for a handful, are nudes. The exhibition is the first time these works have been shown together, and provides a focused look at this important collection; it also marks the centenary of the deaths of Klimt and Schiele.

Below are the three Schiele pieces with descriptions from the museum:

Seated Nude Girl Clasping Her Left Knee (1918)

"Here, the young daughter of one of Schiele's models shields her nudity with a pulled-up knee, unlike in the lithograph of Girl (1918) [...]"

Girl (1918)

"The girl leans her head pensively on what might be a pillow, and by opening her legs unselfconsciously reveals her pubic area. Seemingly oblivious to the implication and potential reception of the girl's exposure." ["Seemingly" is probably a fitting word, because there's a chance that the girl was not "oblivious".]

Standing Nude Girl, Facing Left (1918)

"Here, the same daughter of one of Schiele's models appears in three-quarter profile."

To put the three pieces into perspective, it may help to read Jeanette Zwingenberger's description of Schiele's Two Girls (Lovers) (1911) in her book Egon Schiele.

Two Girls (Lovers) (1911) 

Coupled with The Met Breuer's admission that the watercolors are "erotic and evocative" and Zwingenberger's admission that Schiele had an "obsession with all aspects of the erotic", it's very safe to say that The Met Breuer has sided with art, in the art versus [child] pornography debate.

Cody Delistraty wrote in his post "Rethinking Schiele" on The Paris Review :

Egon Schiele first began hosting teenage girls at his studio in Neulengbach, Austria, around 1910 [...] girls, often from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds, would come spend time there with him and his model-slash-lover Walburga Neuzil, whom he called Wally. Schiele was only twenty at the time. Wally was seventeen. The age of consent in Austria was fourteen (as it is today), and their relationship wasn’t much of a scandal. What was a scandal was Schiele’s painting the children and teenagers who came by his studio and, as would be written in his arrest warrant two years later, his “failing to keep erotic nudes in a sufficiently safe place”—that is, exposing these young people to his supposedly pornographic paintings and drawings.

Tatjana Georgette Anna von Mossig (1912)

In April 1912, Schiele was arrested and accused of “seducing” Tatjana Georgette Anna von Mossig. Mossig, a thirteen-year-old girl from Neulengbach whose father was an esteemed naval officer, had asked Schiele and Neuzil to take her to Vienna to live with her grandmother. Like many young people, she wanted to escape her provincial town. The artist and his lover agreed to take her, but once they got to Vienna, Mossig had a change of heart and wanted to return home. The next day, Schiele and Neuzil dutifully returned her. In the meantime, however, her father had gone to the police and filed charges of kidnapping and statutory rape against Schiele. That the young man was an artist—and one who depicted younger women—helped fuel the father’s suspicions. A third charge was leveled, too: public immorality for exposing young people to his art.

When the police came to arrest Schiele, they took around 125 of his drawings, classifying them as “degenerate”; as a symbolic gesture, a judge burned one of them in court. In total, Schiele would spend only twenty-four days in prison after the first two charges—kidnapping and statutory rape—were dropped, but the charges of degeneracy stuck, as they have stuck to his legacy.

Tatjana in Color (2003)

In 2003, Tatjana in Color, a play written by Julia Jordan, was performed at A Culture Project on Bleecker street here in New York City. Jerry Tallmer wrote in his review of the play, "The Egon Schiele affair from the girl’s point of view" in the The Villager: 

The play sweeps us deliciously into her version (and kid sister Antonia’s woozy version) of events leading up to and beyond Schiele’s arrest in April 1912 for the rape of 12-year-old Tatjana, and the trial-by-magistrate that ended with Schiele serving 21 days in prison for corruption of the morals of a minor.

Erich Heckel's Nude [Pre] Teen Model: 12-Year-Old Fränzi

Erich Heckel's Fränzi Reclining (German: Fränzi liegend).1910 is highlighted on page 46 of the book MoMA Highlights: 350 Works from The Museum of Modern Art. Fränzi was 12-years-old when the woodcut composition was done. 

The nymphet frequently posed for Heckel, a German painter, printmaker and founder of the artists group Die Brücke (English: The Bridge). The book states that Heckel and the Expressionists: "[...] were drawn to the natural yet awkward positions that she assumed because they were so unlike the artificial stances of professional models." 

I doubt that that was all that they were drawn to. 

Fränzi Reclining (German: Fränzi liegend).1910

Per Art & Popular Culture the critic James Auer opined:

"[...] in many ways [Fränzi Reclining] encapsulates the principal virtues of the entire Expressionist movement. At once frank and respectful, daring and compassionate, it depicts a girl-woman on the cusp of adolescence, innocent and free yet, at the same time, curious and knowing."

Standing Child. 1910. 

In addition, Fränzi was the model for Heckel's Standing Child (German: Stehendes Kind) 1910. The curator's notes on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art website states:

"While in Dresden the four Brücke artists used an adolescent girl named Fränzi as a model. The subject of this print, she was regarded as the ideal child of the new society, at once innocent and wise. Although there are traditional elements in this composition the standing figure, the landscape beyond the window there is nothing complacent about it. In contrast to her unformed, almost sexless body, the child's strong, crudely drawn face conveys in a minimum of detail an expression implying knowledge beyond her years."

And what is this knowledge that the curator is referring to? #rhetoricalquestion

Amazon's I LOVE DICK: A Teen Masturbates, Watches Porn & Studies Impressionism

Self-Portrait with his Wife and a Glass of Champagne, 1902

Above is Lovis Cornith's Self-Portrait with his Wife and a Glass of Champagne, 1902. 43-year-old Lovis, a German artist and writer, fell in love with Charlotte Berend, his future wife, when she was 21. But what led me to this painting may be more intriguing than their 22-year age-gap - especially since Charlotte wasn't a true nymphet.

I saw the billboard for "I Love Dick" in a Manhattan subway. I naively refused believe that it was a sexual pun, and I made no plans to watch the Amazon series. However, after I read a Jennifer Krasinki piece in the Village Voice that the women on the show were going to: "speak directly to the camera about their sexual histories", I was intrigued. 

In the spirit of Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies and Tavi Gevinson's Rookie, Chris shared: 

"Dear Dick, I've been horny since I was six. I used to press my crotch into the belly of my stuffed Rhino [...] I'd love to hump him in front of our sitter Karen Harris. I used to say that Rhino was hungry and that I needed to feed him [...] In high school, I wanted to fuck anybody - male or female."

Chris

Toby shared with Dick that her dad "was an expert on children", which he thought "allowed" him to "touch" her, and when she was a nymphet, she was exposed to porn, which she couldn't get out of her head. 

And with the porn still "stuck" in her head, Toby entered Columbia at the age of 16 where she studied 19th century diagrams of the ideal breast shape; hence, Lovis' Self-Portrait with his Wife and a Glass of Champagne, 1902.

Toby

AMERICAN MINOR (2009): Teen Boredom Leads to Masturbation

L.A. based artist, University of California fine arts instructor, and writer Charlie White's muse is the American teen. For example, White's short film, American Minor, depicts the day in the life of a 14-year-old American nymphet. Here's the film's description posted on Vimeo:

American Minor is a meditation on the popular image of the American teen girl. Through carefully created, lingering scenes, the film focuses on the external environment and internal state of a fourteen-year-old, upper-middle-class blonde girl whose world is defined through products, objects, and perpetual consumption. The film observes a single, protracted morning in the life of a picture-perfect American youth lost in the dehumanizing space that wealth, isolation, and fear can provide. By watching this American teen perform basic acts, from eating cereal, to watching television, to combing her hair, the film aims to reveal the complicated relationship between personal pleasure and politics, youth and sexuality, and class and suppression. [Emphasis added]

The film's description doesn't spoil that the references to "personal pleasure and politics, youth and sexuality" are referring to the film's depiction of the teen masturbating in the shower - in what appears to be to orgasm. 

American Minor (2009): [Edited] Trailer 

A NSFW search on TikTok and Google will confirm White's meditation of the American teen girl, and her sophisticated affair with pleasure, youth and sexuality. 

Unsurprisingly, taking into account the allure of a (wealthy American blonde) nymphet, the short film premiered in Nine Lives at the Hammer Museum (2009). and it was featured at the Sundance Film Festival (2009) and Director’s Fortnight in Cannes (2009). 

One can view American Minor here.

Famous Ephebophile: Artist Sir Peter Paul Rubens

Nabokov wrote in Lolita, "A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girls Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist ..."

And that is exactly what 53-year-old artist Sir Peter Paul Rubens did when he "pointed out" 16-year-old Hélène Fourment. 

The Flemish Baroque painter and the nymphet had four sons and seven daughters. 

Visit Rubens' Artsy page to read his bio, view over 40 of his paintings, read exclusive articles and get current exhibition listings.