ADRIAEN VAN STALBEMT | WOODED RIVER LANDSCAPE WITH TOBIAS AND THE ANGEL

Adriaen van Stalbemt was a painter of Flemish origin who moved to Middelburg with his Protestant family after the Fall of Antwerp in 1585, when the city was forced to surrender to the Catholic Spanish forces. He most likely received his artistic training in Middelburg but later returned to Antwerp in 1609, having also spent 10 months in England, where he painted two views of Greenwich with King Charles I and Henrietta Maria in 1633-34 (Royal Collection). 

This painting is one of fairly few dated works within Stalbemt's œuvre. Lack of dates on other paintings and an eclectic style make Stalbemt's chronology difficult to determine. The present panel must have been painted in Antwerp and the painterly brushstrokes, particularly in the surrounding foliage, reveal a move away from the influences of artists such as Gillis van Coninxloo and Jan Brueghel the Elder, whose meticulousness Stalbemt imitated in other works.

The subject appears to have been popular with wealthy merchants who sent their sons away on business trips, as it addresses themes of filial piety, enterprise and charity. The story is taken from the apocryphal Book of Tobit. Tobias was sent by his blind merchant father, Tobit, to collect a debt. The Archangel Raphael accompanied Tobias and instructed him to extract the heart and liver of a fish to heal his father's blindness, which Tobias did upon returning home. It is unusual to picture the act of dissecting the fish, as Stalbemt has done here.