Thus begins the reviewer for the Royal Academy of Arts Magazine, warming up the reader for his take on the blockbuster exhibition “Rubens and his Legacy: Van Dyck to Cezanne,” which traveled from Brussels to London in 2015 accompanied by a hefty and informative catalogue. That Januszczak's sexist and proudly fat-phobic appraisal is merely the latest addition to a centuries-old tradition of gendered Rubens criticism is by now, I hope, obvious. Feminist scholarship aside, a writer for the quarterly publication of Britain's longest established art school, “run by artists” since Reynolds's day in 1768, assumes the like-minded reader will appreciate Rubens's art only in proportion to his sexual attraction to (or revulsion for) the kinds of female bodies the artist paints. Of course, in 2014, Januszczak's jokey, locker-room inanity helped pave the way for what was coming. Two years later another recalcitrant chauvinist who “has repeatedly mocked women for being overweight” in the words of the New York Times, would become president of the United States “having accused women of having ‘fat, ugly’ faces and of repelling voters because of their looks.”

Had I begun this research at Berkeley in the era of Trump as, once again—as far as I know—the only out queer woman of color in the doctoral program in art history, but still interested in writing a book about Rubens and representations of female power—there are many things I would have approached differently.