Reverend Johannes Elison

In 1634 Johannes Elison was in his early 50s and had long been minister of the Dutch Reformed church in Norwich, in England, a congregation of Protestant families from the Low Countries who had settled there in the previous century. That year he and his wife, Maria Bockenolle, were in Amsterdam, where their son, also called Johannes, was a merchant, and the son ordered portraits of both of them from Rembrandt. He was exactly the painter's age, born like him in 1606. What he paid for was a format the museum associates with royal and noble sitters, each parent life-size and full-length on a canvas about one and three quarter metres tall, and far more expensive than the usual head or half-length. Rembrandt places the minister among books and papers, the equipment of a learned man. Elison went back to Norwich and died there five years later, in 1639.