At the age of twenty-three, Charles, Prince of Wales, possessed a self-portrait by Rubens. Rubens was then forty-six. He had not designed, nor was he to design, any other portrait of himself for a prince. In 1623, when Charles asked him for his own picture, he had finished the big series of Bible stories for the ceiling of the Jesuit Church in Antwerp, and was engaged on the political allegories commissioned by Marie de Medici for the walls of the Luxembourg.