Cornelius de Vos was a Flemish portrait painter contemporary with both Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641). Besides portraiture, he also painted large historical, biblical, mythological and allegorical pictures. His patrons were mainly Antwerp burghers and children of the nobility and his work are distinguished by his prosaic attention to detail.

Cornelius De Vos studied under David Remeeus in Antwerp between 1599 and 1604 and was enrolled as a master in the Antwerp Guild in 1608, becoming Dean of the Guild in 1619. He was heavily influenced by the work of his compatriot and subject of this painting, Peter Paul Rubens. There is a stylistic similarity in the subject pictures of de Vos to the largeness of forms and the rhythmic compositional movements of Rubens.

In 1637, Cornelius de Vos, his brother Paul (1596-1678) and his brother-in-law Frans Snyders helped Rubens to provide pictures for Philip IV's hunting lodge near Madrid, the Torre de la Parada. In this painting Rubens is depicted with his first wife Isabella Brant (1591-1626) and their second child. By 1624 Rubens had already established himself as the leading painter in Northern Europe through an important series of paintings. The baroque art of de Vos and Rubens reflected and expressed the renewed confidence of the Roman Catholic church and the power and glory of the autocratic monarchs of the Counter-Reformation.