Hagelstein was born in
Lindau. Houbraken remarked that he had never been in the Netherlands, and only included the biography of Nestus Thomann because of his relationship to other Dutch painters. He took his information from
Joachim von Sandrart's
Teutsche Akademie. According to him, Thoman was born in Hagelstein, a small village near Lindau in 1588 and traveled to Italy in 1605 where he stayed for 15 years, visiting Naples, Genoa and Rome. In Rome he was friends with
Adam Elsheimer,
Pieter Lastman, and
Jan Pinas. According to the
Netherlands Institute for Art History, he was born and died in Lindau as a painter of religious scenes and landscapes. ==References==