The Angel Leaving the Family of Tobias

In 1637 the Dutch Republic got its own official Bible, the States Translation ordered by the Synod of Dort. It still printed the Apocrypha, but apart from the rest, at the back, with a warning to readers that these books were not Holy Scripture. The Book of Tobit was one of them. Even so, painters in Rembrandt's circle in Amsterdam kept returning to it, and Jan Victors, a committed member of the Reformed Church, painted its last scene here in 1651, on a canvas more than two metres wide. Tobias has come home from a dangerous journey with a companion who protected him, won him a wife and finally cured his father's blindness. Now the companion reveals himself as the archangel Raphael and takes leave of the family. Rembrandt had painted the same parting in 1637, on a small panel now in the Louvre. This canvas came to the Bavarian collections from the estate of King Max I Joseph.