Jan de Bisschop was widely influential in art and art publishing. A lawyer by profession, he set up practice in The Hague around 1652 and later founded a drawing academy there. He mingled with an elite circle of intellectuals that included his friend and fellow draftsman, Constantin Huygens the Younger, to whom he served as secretary.

These studies belong to the considerable series of drawings and prints that de Bisschop made after antique sculptures and more contemporary Italian prototypes. He published two books in order to present important antiquities and works by famous Italian painters to a younger generation of artists. The first book, known as the Signorum veterum Icones, published in 1668-69, is composed of some one hundred engravings executed after antique sculptures. The second book, published in 1671, entitled Paradigmata Graphices and dedicated to Jan Six, includes engravings after old master drawings. These publications were influential in the development of Dutch classical painting toward the end of the seventeenth century, as well as highly appreciated in collectors’ cabinets. De Bisschop’s classical interests also manifested themselves in his use of the Latinized version of his name, Episcopius. His drawings and prints, both after antique and renaissance sculpture and paintings and in the landscape genre, are of the greatest quality and delicacy.

For further information on de Bisschop's works after Italian and classical models, see Episcopius. Jan de Bisschop (1628-1671), advocaat en tekenaar, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam, Museum het Rembrandthuis, 1992, pp. 38-63.