About this work
Yrsselius is depicted wearing the white habit of the Premonstratensians, with the mitre and the crozier by his side — the full visual grammar of his ecclesiastical authority. Painted in oil on oak panel and measuring 120 × 102.5 cm, the work is a commanding three-quarter-length portrait in which the aged abbot — then in his early eighties — is rendered with the unflinching specificity Rubens reserved for his finest individual sitters. The palette is anchored by the luminous white of the religious habit, which Rubens uses to draw the eye immediately to the figure, playing it against the deeper, richer tones of the surroundings. The sitter's hands are folded, his bearing composed but alive, and the face carries the weight of a long life in service — lined, observant, unmistakably present.
The painting dates to 1624 and was originally conceived as a sepulchral tablet accompanied by an epitaph, placed by the abbot's grave in the church of Sint-Michiel's Abbey . Its purpose was devotional as well as commemorative: it was intended to be hung so that the abbot faced the high altar with his hands folded in "eternal prayer," taking part in the adoration of the Christ Child depicted on the altarpiece — a form of all-inclusive decoration where figures in paintings are connected by gaze, gesture, and spatial links that is a defining feature of the Baroque.
A few years before his death, Yrsselius had donated to that same church a Rubens altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi for the high altar — meaning Rubens painted both the devotional object and the devotee in a single, theologically unified programme. At this same moment in 1624, Rubens was also completing his *Assumption of the Virgin* for Antwerp Cathedral, framing it with a marble portico in a typically Baroque interplay of painting and sculpture — the portrait of Yrsselius belongs to a year of extraordinary creative density.
Today, the painting is held in the National Museum of Art in Copenhagen, Denmark , where it has been since the early nineteenth century. As a print, it earns a place in rooms that reward sustained looking: a study, a library, or a hall where dark wood and warm lighting can echo the tonal seriousness of the original. It speaks to the viewer who is drawn to portraiture as a form of encounter — to the idea that a face observed closely enough becomes a kind of history. There is nothing decorative or casual about this image. It is a record of conviction, of age, of a man who believed his likeness would outlast him — and was right.
