Peter Paul Rubens died in Antwerp on 30 May 1640, at 62. The usual account says heart failure, brought on by chronic gout.
He was one of the most celebrated painters in Europe. He had married Helena Fourment in 1630, when he was 53 and she was 16, and in 1635 he bought a country house, the Steen, outside Antwerp. In 1638 he began a cycle of scenes from Ovid for Philip IV of Spain.
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Gout is the word in every summary of his death, and it sounds like a settled diagnosis. It is not quite one. In the seventeenth century the word covered almost any painful, swollen joint. A 2008 medical review of his case says it plainly: "most rheumatism was called gout" in his era.
So Rubens may have been dying of something else. The physician Thierry Appelboom has argued that he had rheumatoid arthritis, and one of his clues sits in a painting from 1638: a hand that Rubens may have painted from his own.
The body is in doubt too. When scientists opened Rubens's crypt in 2018, they could not say which of the bones were his.
What did gout mean in Rubens's day?
Much less than it means now. The 2008 review calls his diagnosis of "gouty rheumatism" well documented, then asks the obvious question: did he really have gout, when "most rheumatism was called gout" at the time? A word that broad could cover nearly any joint disease.
The pattern he showed fits a different disease better than it fits classic gout. A rheumatology survey of artists, drawing on Appelboom's work from 1981, describes chronic, symmetrical trouble in the feet, knees and hands, interrupted by flares.
It lists rheumatoid arthritis as the likely diagnosis and gout as the alternative. It also notes pleuritis, an inflammation of the lining of the lungs.
None of this changes the date, 30 May 1640, or the heart failure that ended it. It changes what the heart failure was the end of. No document I could find settles whether the disease was gout, rheumatoid arthritis or something else.
What You'll Discover
What a painted hand gives away.
What he painted at the end.
Whose bones lie in his crypt.