Vorsterman was the most talented and celebrated of the engravers of reproductive prints for Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641). He was likely directed to Elsheimer’s work through Rubens’s own admiration for this artist. Vorsterman based his etching on Hendrick Goudt’s engraving after Elsheimer’s second painting—now lost—of Tobias and the Angel, known as The Large Tobias. Indeed, his radical transformation of the composition, leaving out the rich landscape background in favour of a monumental figure group filling the frame, conforms to Rubens’s preoccupation with the figure.