It was described by Seymour Slive as Ter Brugghen's "masterpiece": "the large, full, forms of the group have been knit together into a magnificent design, and what could have been hard and sculptural is remarkably softened by the soft, silvery light which plays over Sebastian's half-dead, olive-grey body as well as the reds, creamy whites, and plum colours worn by the women who tend the saint".

[8] The Baroque artists usually treated it as a nocturnal chiaroscuro scene, illuminated by a single candle, torch or lantern, in the style fashionable in the first half of the 17th century, and typically set it in an interior, after Sebastian has been carried away.

Rather than painting the scene of Sebastian being shot with arrows, in the midst of his attempted execution, Ter Brugghen chooses to show the moments afterwards where Irene and her maid untie him from the tree.

[5] Some attribute this narrative shift to the emergence of the plague within Utrecht in the 1620s: several artists desiring a subject saved from agony, turn to painting the rescue of the Catholicism's personification of suffering.

Ter Brugghen depicts Sebastian with a sickly green pallor, his limp body lying in suffering and resembling much of the diseased or dead one would encounter in Utrecht at the time.

Had this painting been truly intended for an institution dedicated to healing the sick and afflicted with plague or hidden church, it is interesting to see how Ter Brugghen constructs this composition for its audience.

Dramatic lighting cast from the upper left corner of the painting and subtle use of iconography such as the tree in the background, symbolic of a crucifixion, delicately suggests the presence of God, perhaps observing the rescue from above.

[11] Victims seeking relief and comfort would look upon Ter Brugghen's painting, finding likeness in Sebastian's sickly pallor as he is alleviated from affliction and perhaps encounter respite or be invoked to religious worship.

Painted the same year, Ter Brugghen's Crucifixion with the Virgin and St. John is accepted to be very similar in stylistic features and perhaps intended for the same destination as Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene.

[13] Dirck van Baburen, another Utrecht Caravaggisti who once shared a studio with Ter Brugghen, painted his own rendition of Saint Irene tending to the shot Sebastian a decade earlier.