The Graces were minor deities but in this splendid work Peter Paul Rubens devotes his best effort to them. The three goddesses embrace each other forming a circle. The positioning of their feet suggests movement; they seem to dance gently. The setting is as luscious as the nude bodies of the goddesses. A field illuminated by sunlight filtered through dense trees stretches to a distant blue. The shadows cast by the figures show that they are lit from a source placed opposite the sun; Rubens is not a realist, he strives for effect. All is watered by a fountain crowned by a child with a cornucopia, the horn of abundance. A few touches of paint on his back suggest the presence of a wing. If so, this is Cupid, the child god who is sometimes associated with a problematic kind of love but is shown here in a positive light: the liquid emanating from his fountain is a blessing to the world. From the cornucopia and the branch of a tree hangs a garland of white and red roses in full bloom. They echo the splendour of the Graces, as the forms of the fountain echo their bodies.

This is a personal painting: Rubens must have made it to keep, as attested by the fact that it was in his collection when he died, and that we do not know of a sketch made for it (he made sketches to show his ideas to either clients or assistants, but not when working for himself). Scholars have long noted that the figure to the left resembles his portraits of his second wife, Helena Fourment. The other two women look at her and may be welcoming her. If we follow this narrative, she could be the owner of the clothes that hang from the branch of a tree - one set of clothes only, roughly contemporary, and not ancient, as would correspond to the goddesses. The idea of making ancient myths relevant by bringing them close to his own time and life is characteristic of Rubens (this is especially evident in the Garden of Love).

Whether Rubens turned the myth of the three Graces into a scene where his wife is received as a third Grace into the realm of the gods by the other two, we will never know. He married Helena in December of 1630, when she was only sixteen and he fifty-three. From that time on he cast on her the eyes of love fulfilled, to judge from many of his paintings. This one is usually dated somewhat later than the wedding, but in truth we do not known when it was painted; it may have been made in connection to that event. The Graces were sometimes mentioned in ancient epithalamia, songs or speeches that were given as part of wedding ceremonies in Ancient Greece and Rome where love and fertility played a major part. Claudian, for example, in his Epithalamium of Honorius and Maria wrote that the "Graces gather flowers for the feast".

Be this as it may, this is a wonderful conceit - a gift, we could say, of a plentiful idea of life and the world personified in the female body. In the mythological sources, beginning with Hesiod’s Theogony, the Graces were frequent companions of Venus, adding to the love and fertility that she personifies a component of charm, pleasure, and joy.

In most sources the Graces are said to be daughters of Zeus and Hera, and were named Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Talia, or Brightness, Joyfulness, and Bloom (but Seneca, in his text On Benefits, wrote about these names that "each one twists the significance of these names to suit himself, and tries to make them fit some theory"). The Graces were also associated with generosity and reciprocity. Writing about the concept of reciprocity in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle states that good deeds should be repaid in kind: "This is why we set up a shrine of the Graces in a public place, to remind men to return a kindness". Statues of the Graces were erected near springs as a way of giving back to nature well before the time of Aristotle. It is interesting that there is an echo of this today in both the Italian and Spanish languages, where the words grazie and gracias mean "thank you" - they are used to show gratitude for something received (this was already true of the form gratias agere, "to thank" or to "give thanks", as used in the fourth century Vulgate, for example, in Matthew 15:36). "Thanks" is what Rubens is saying to life and the world with this painting (Vergara, Alejandro, in Mythological Passions, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2021, pp. 168-170).