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| Jan de Bisschop Fleeing Daughter (from the Niobe Group at the Uffizi, Florence) ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |
"According to a letter of 8 April 1583 written by Valerio Cioli, a sculptor and restorer, to the secretary of the Grand Duke, Francesco I, of Tuscany, most of the statues which compose the Niobe Group had been discovered, together with the Wrestlers, a few days before in a vigna belonging to the Tommasini de Gallese family near Porta S. Giovanni, Rome. On 25 June of the same year, they were purchased by Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici from the Varese family. Prints of the statues in their fragmented state were published in 1594, but they had probably been restored by 1588 when plaster casts of the group arrived in Florence; once restored, the statues were displayed in the garden of the Villa Medici in Rome where they are described in an inventory of 1598. They were removed from Rome in 1769, and recorded at Livorno on 14 May 1770 when they were entrusted to the restorer Innocenzo Spinazzi whose work on the group continued until 1776. By 1781 they were displayed in a room in the Uffizi specially designed for them and adorned with modern reliefs illustrating the same legend."
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| Jan de Bisschop Fleeing Son (from the Niobe Group at the Uffizi, Florence) ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |
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| Jan de Bisschop Dying Son (from the Niobe Group at the Uffizi, Florence) ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |
"By the first decades of the nineteenth century most scholars were convinced that the sculptures were copies and more and more questions had by then been asked about the quality of some of the statues in the group. Nonetheless, the French Ministry of the Interior, writing in 1799, had placed the group immediately after the Venus de' Medici in a list of statues which he felt desirable to expropriate from Florence. Mrs. Starkie, although rather worried about the status of the group in 1800, felt able to reassure her readers in 1820 that it was 'generally considered as the most interesting effort of the Grecian Chisel Italy can boast' ; and Shelley convinced himself that the face of Niobe was, with the entire figure of the Apollo Belvedere, 'the most consummate personification of loveliness ... that remains to us of Greek antiquity'."
– from Taste and the Antique by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny (Yale University Press, 1981)
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| William Hilton Head of Niobe ca. 1801-1839 drawing British Museum |
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| Jan de Bisschop The Arundel Homer ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |
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| Jan de Bisschop Caryatid (now in Munich) ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |
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| Jan de Bisschop Dancing Muse (now in Liverpool) ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |
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| Jan de Bisschop Draped Woman (now in Buckinghamshire) ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |
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| Jan de Bisschop Herm of Hercules ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |
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| Jan de Bisschop Muse (now at the Ashmolean Museum, with non-matching head removed) ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |
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| Jan de Bisschop Statue of Meleager ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |
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| Jan de Bisschop Statue of Sabina (now in Florence) ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |
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| Jan de Bisschop Vestal Virgin (now at the Uffizi) ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |
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| Jan de Bisschop Standing Goddess (formerly at the Villa Medici in Rome) ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |
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| Jan de Bisschop Seated Pan ca. 1643-71 etching British Museum |