Landscape with farmstead, peasants and the exodus of Tobias with the angel

This 1630 landscape from the Gemäldegalerie Berlin blends Bloemaert's figure-painting tradition with the Italianate landscape mode that was transforming Dutch painting at exactly this moment, as artists returning from Rome brought back a vision of warm, golden southern light imposed on northern compositional habits. The departure of Tobias with the angel Raphael — drawn from the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit — provided a narrative pretext for a landscape that stretches beyond the figures to include farmstead, sky, and distant topography. By embedding a biblical episode in a pastoral setting, Bloemaert joined a generation of Utrecht painters who used sacred narrative to sanctify their landscapes without subordinating pictorial interest in the natural world to purely devotional ends. The Gemäldegalerie Berlin, with its survey of European painting from the medieval period through the eighteenth century, places this work within the full development of landscape as a genre.

The composition uses the landscape as a primary structural element rather than a mere backdrop, with the figures integrated into a spatial environment that extends far beyond them. The handling of foliage is Italianate in its warmth and looseness, suggesting the influence of Bloemaert's students who had returned from Rome with new ideas about light and colour. The farmstead provides architectural interest in the middle distance, anchoring the landscape in human habitation.