Writing from the southern Netherlands in 1781, Sir Joshua Reynolds opined that among Rubens's deficiencies as a painter, “we may reckon beauty in his female characters: sometimes indeed they make approaches to it; they are healthy and comely women, but seldom, if ever, possess any degree of excellence.” While Reynolds helped establish a now-standard characterization of the women Rubens painted, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term ‘Rubenesque’ was not generally in use until around 1815. In that year, it was rather benignly employed by a contributor to the English Repository of Arts to describe typically Rubensian (ornamental) accessories such as ribbons and flowers. By 1834, however, the adjective had taken on many of the negative anatomical connotations for which it has since been known. It appeared in “The Lover of Beauty; or Which will He Wed?,” a romance anonymously published in a London science and arts monthly known as The Analyst. The ‘He’ of the story is a vain and “idolatrous” bachelor captain who falls physically in love with a pretty but vapid distant female relation only to fall cerebrally in love with a less-than-conventionally attractive and/but highly intelligent female wit (in the end, the same person!). Recoiling at his first sight of the woman in question, the captain complains: “of her figure we are reluctantly compelled to speak less flatteringly, a single glimpse was sufficient to indicate that it had never been moulded by the graces […] it was, in truth, broad and cumbrous, we may say Rubenesque.”

In the centuries since his death in 1640, Rubens has often been associated with women. Undoubtedly, the superficial reason for this is the prominence and characteristic appearance of female figures in his art.