Tobias and the Angel Pieter Lastman

Pieter Lastman spent several years of his youth in Italy, and upon his return to Amsterdam, he achieved widespread acclaim as an accomplished exponent of Italian art. His mythological and biblical paintings even exerted their influence on the young Rembrandt, who studied in Lastman’s workshop. In this depiction of an episode from the Old Testament, Tobias is struggling with the fish he has just landed, and beside him stands his companion, the Archangel Raphael, who – apart from his wings – has the flesh-and-blood appearance of a mortal man. Innovatively, the artist placed his figures not in some idyllic imaginary landscape, but in an apparently real setting reminiscent of the scenery of his homeland. The forest, the cloudy sky that merges as one with the river, and the little house by the waterside, with the nearby washerwomen hard at work, all offer glimpses of the tools used by practitioners of the then-novel realistic approach in Dutch landscape painting.