Johan Adler Salvius was a very prominent diplomat. For a long time he represented Sweden in Hamburg, and in the 1640s he was one of the envoys to the Congress of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War. The delegates were painted by the Flemish artist Anselmus van Hulle, whose workshop then sold countless copies of the portraits. This painting of Adler Salvius is part of a series of some seventy similar images of envoys to the congress.