Portrait of Michiel Ophovius (1570-1637), bishop of 's-Hertogenbosch

Rubens painted this friar in the middle of the 1610s, while the Twelve Years' Truce had paused the long war between Spain and the Dutch Republic. Michael Ophovius was a Dominican, as the black cloak over his white habit shows, and prior of St Paul's monastery in Antwerp, where the portrait stayed until about 1795. Rubens caught him mid-speech, lips parted and one hand opened toward us, as if arguing a point or preaching. The truce ran out in 1621. Ophovius, whose sympathies lay with the Spanish side, was arrested soon after while travelling through the Republic, and he spent almost two years locked in the Prison Gate, the old jail on the Buitenhof in The Hague. That gatehouse is a short walk from the Mauritshuis, where King William I placed his portrait in 1822.