Needleworks such as this one were not always created from the imagination of the artist’s mind, but more often worked from an etching or a woodcut, typically published in a book. This lot, with its presentation of stories from the Book of Tobias, is based on a woodcut by Bernard Saloman (c. 1508-1561) published in Quadrins historiques de la Bible, by Claude Paradin and Jean de Tournes in Lyons in 1553. The book’s short verses and accompanying woodcuts told the stories from the Old Testament in an abridged manner and proved very popular, it was quickly translated into Spanish, German, Italian, Latin and English, with its English title reading: The true and lyuely historyke purtreatures of the vvoll Bible. A needlepoint panel depicting Tobias and the Great Fish apparently identical to this lot was previously in the Collection of Sir Frederick Richmond, see Nancy Graves Cabot, ‘Pattern Sources of Scriptural Subjects in Tudor and Stuart Embroideries’, Bulletin of the Needle and Bobbin Club, Vol. 30, 1946, p. 18, fig. 10.