Tobias and the Angel

Tobias and the Angel is one of the most evocative works by Pieter Mulier, II, painted around 1685. The canvas distills the obsessions of the 1650-1700 era — patrons, faith, power, and the fragile theatre of human emotion — into a single, charged image.

Created in 1685 during the 1650-1700 period, this work belongs firmly within the daily life tradition. Pieter Mulier, II worked at a moment when the rivalry between Catholic Baroque drama and Protestant restraint reshaped what a painting could mean. Every gesture, fabric, and gleam of light was decoded by contemporary viewers like a private language.

The physical object — Oil on canvas, 196.9 × 248.3 cm (77 1/2 × 97 3/4 in.) — carries its own history of handling and restoration. Pieter Mulier, II's brushwork here moves between exacting description and looser, more suggestive passages, a balance typical of Baroque studio practice.

Look closely and the painting opens up. Objects you might pass over — a folded letter, a half-drawn curtain, the angle of a glance — were placed to be read. Scenes like this were prized precisely because they made ordinary labor and leisure worth painting at all.

Housed at Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, the painting has passed through the hands of collectors, dealers, and institutions before reaching public view — a provenance that is itself part of the object's story.

“A silence so complete it becomes its own witness.”