Isabella Brant was the daughter of Jan Brant, one of Antwerp's four esteemed civic secretaries and a respected humanist; her uncle's family connections and Rubens's own brother Philip, who served alongside Jan Brant in the same civic role, meant Rubens married directly into an intellectually and socially prominent Antwerp circle^[2]. The marriage came very shortly after Rubens had been named court painter to the Archdukes, a status that only strengthened his standing with the Brant family^[2]. Despite the obvious practical advantages of the match, contemporaries and later art historians alike have read the couple as genuinely well matched, and Rubens's mother, who had died before the wedding, would likely have approved of a son-in-law family headed, like her own late husband, by a successful lawyer^[2].

Rather than a formal record of the wedding ceremony, the double portrait is set in a natural, pastoral setting emphasising the couple's happiness and tenderness rather than any official rite^[3]. Rubens transforms the traditional dextrarum iunctio, the joining of right hands that had served as a legally binding betrothal gesture in earlier portraiture such as van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, into a softer sign of affection, without losing its underlying symbolic weight^[3]. The couple's clothing tells its own story regardless of the picture's informal setting: Isabella's bejewelled bracelet signals her family's wealth, and Rubens's sword hilt, casually held rather than displayed, still gestures toward a quasi-aristocratic status the artist had not been born into^[3]. A subtle hierarchy survives the picture's egalitarian mood too, since Rubens sits while Isabella kneels on the grass beside him^[3].

The year after their wedding, Rubens and Isabella moved into a new house on the Wapper, in what was then the most fashionable part of Antwerp, which Rubens renovated and expanded himself according to Italian architectural ideals, adding a large studio wing completed by 1618^[2][4]. He created a garden in an antique style, ornamented with sculptures of Greek gods he designed personally, connected to the house by a portico that led to his workshop^[5]. That expanding studio came to house a large body of assistants and apprentices alongside Rubens's own extensive personal art collection and library, among the most substantial in Antwerp at the time; the building survives today as the Rubenshuis Museum^[1].