Judah and Tamar

Entry

Judah, the son of Jacob, chose Tamar to be the wife of his eldest son, Er. After Judah became a widower and Tamar a widow, Judah made a trip to Timnah to shear his sheep. Tamar, disguised as a prostitute, sat down on the road and when Judah saw her he desired her. Not recognizing his daughter-in-law, he had intercourse with her. When Judah later wanted to have her burned for prostitution, she produced the signet ring and cord that he had given to her as a pledge and Judah admitted that she was in the right (Genesis 38).

In the drawing, Tamar is seated next to Judah under a tree. He is holding a cord in one hand and a staff in the other. In the left background is the flock of sheep that Judah was to shear. In the right background is a later scene: the stake where Tamar was to be burned is being prepared and Tamar is showing the pledge to Judah.

The drawing, which is in particularly good condition, was executed with a fine pen over a sketch in black chalk. The leaves on the trees were redrawn over the wash, this time with broader strokes of the pen. The clothing is partially blue, red and orange-brown, and there is some green in the trees; the rest of the scene is sketched in brown. The figures have been very carefully drawn, but the trees and the scenes in the background are sketchily rendered. As far as we know, Rembrandt never portrayed this subject, but a number of his students did: for instance, Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680) in a painting in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (inv. no. 17.3268);² Willem Drost (1633-1659) in a pen-and-ink sketch in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (inv. no. R 9 (PK));³ in a painting by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621-1674) in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (inv. no. 406);⁴ and several paintings by Arent de Gelder (1645-1727), including one in a private collection;⁵ one formerly in the Bader collection and now in the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario (inv. no. 44-009);⁶ and one in the Mauritshuis, The Hague (inv. no. 40).⁷ The probable model for this scene is a painting by Pieter Lastman (1583-1633), formerly on the New York art market,⁸ which was well-known through a reproductive print (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-46.590) that has been attributed to Lastman, but was probably made by Jan van Noordt (c. 1620-c. 1675) after the painting.⁹

Which pupil made the museum’s drawing has not yet been determined. There is some resemblance to the View of the Belvedere in Nijmegen, a drawing attributed to Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693) in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 1116).¹⁰ We cannot, however, attribute the museum’s drawing to this artist, but the similarities to aspects of his work show that Judah and Tamar was probably made by a pupil who was also under Rembrandt’s influence during the 1640s.

Peter Schatborn, 2018