Isaac Blessing Jacob (Genesis 27:21-29)

Entry

The subject of this painting, the Old Testament tale of the contest between the twins Jacob and Esau to receive the blessing of their aged father Isaac, is one of the greatest stories of sibling rivalry and filial deceit ever told. On his deathbed, the blind Isaac summoned Esau, who had been the first to emerge from the womb, for the blessing, instructing him to prepare for it by hunting for some venison and cooking a meal of it. Isaac’s wife Rebecca, to whom it had been prophesied before they were born that the older son would serve the younger, overheard this conversation and conceived a plan to enable Jacob to take Esau’s place. She sent Jacob to kill two kids, which she prepared for Isaac, and put Esau’s finest clothing on Jacob. Because Esau was a hairy man, and Jacob a smooth one, Rebecca put the skins of the two kids on Jacob’s hands, who then went to his father posing as his brother. Isaac was at first suspicious, but after feeling Jacob’s gloved hands and smelling Esau’s scent on his clothing, was convinced his firstborn was before him. He ate the meat and drank the wine Jacob brought and blessed him, saying: ‘Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine: Let people serve thee, and nations bow down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee: cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee’ (Genesis 27:28-29).

Govert Flinck shows the climax of the story, the dramatic moment before Isaac bestows his blessing and Jacob and Rebecca’s ruse succeeds. Isaac’s right hand is raised to Jacob’s head, while with his left hand he still holds one of the latter’s gloved hands. Jacob wears his brother’s garments, which are a little too large for him, and to which the colourful turban forming a repoussoir at the foot of the bed probably belongs. On a table in the background is the savoury meat and a tankard of wine. Rebecca anxiously observes the scene. According to the biblical narrative, she was not present in the room at the time of the blessing, but it was already standard practice to include her in depictions of the subject long before Flinck took it up.¹⁵

A popular theme on both sides of the Alps in the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, Flinck’s painting is one of the earliest treatments by a follower of Rembrandt.¹⁶ The presence of a vanished signature and date of 1638 on the work is recorded, and often reproduced in facsimile in Rijksmuseum collection catalogues published between 1859 and 1960.¹⁷ According to Von Moltke, these ‘disappeared when the picture was cleaned’,¹⁸ but it has been assumed in the more recent literature that they never truly existed.¹⁹ Subsequently, the Isaac Blessing Jacob has been assigned by some scholars to the early 1640s, without reference, however, to any dated paintings by way of comparison.²⁰ Moreover, the implication that the signature and date were falsified by the Rijksmuseum in the late nineteenth century is completely unjustified.²¹ The work had been attributed to Flinck since at least 1786,²² and the museum, which acquired it as such in 1808, had no intention of selling it.²³ The circumstances surrounding the discovery of the signature had nothing to do with financial gain, but rather were the result of scholarly diligence. The first Rijksmuseum collection catalogue to include signature facsimiles was produced in 1858. The sole purpose of the 1859 supplement was to publish an additional 22 signatures, including the one on the present painting, which had been overlooked the previous year.²⁴

The Rijksmuseum picture was probably the one auctioned as a Rembrandt in Amsterdam on 17 April 1758.²⁵ In the copy of the catalogue owned by the collector Johan Aegidiusz van der Marck preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, that artist’s name was replaced by Flinck’s. The dimensions of the work in the sale correspond almost exactly with the present painting, rather than the somewhat larger version discussed below.²⁶ It seems possible that the signature, which was rediscovered in 1859, was deliberately obscured when the Rijksmuseum picture was put on the block in 1758.

The aforementioned other version of the subject by Flinck, now on loan to Museum Catharijneconvent, does not bear a date, but has been correctly considered by all scholars to be earlier than the Rijksmuseum painting (fig. a). The treatment of the fabrics, facial features and still-life elements in the later work is much more elaborate and varied. Isaac’s beard in the picture in the Catharijneconvent, for example, has a generalized, frizzy appearance that is the same in texture as Jacob’s hair. In the Rijksmuseum painting, on the other hand, the beard is composed of broader strokes of diverse lengths, thickness and colour, running in opposite directions and including scratching. The use of the latter technique in particular and the greater attention to variations in texture in general would have been the results of Flinck’s continued study of Rembrandt’s art. The rendering of Isaac’s beard and that of his face, composed as it is of myriad short strokes and an amazing array of colours, is very close to that in Flinck’s signed Bust of an Old Man Wearing a Red Cap in Dresden, which features the same model.²⁷ The 1639 date on that work is a further indication that the 1638 date that has disappeared from the Rijksmuseum canvas need not be questioned. More support comes from Flinck’s 1639 Self-Portrait in London, where the treatment of the face and hair resembles that of Jacob’s in the present painting.²⁸

Another aspect of the Rijksmuseum work that is indebted to Flinck’s study of Rembrandt’s art is the very sophisticated use of light and shadow compared to the version in the Catharijneconvent. The composition nonetheless follows that of the slightly larger earlier picture, with a few important differences. Jacob, who appears to have been painted after the same model, and Rebecca have been moved to the other side of the bed, and the still life at the foot of the bed has been relegated to the background. These compositional changes were worked out in a preparatory drawing (fig. b), where the turban that takes the place of the still life in the earlier version to form a striking repoussoir in the Rijksmuseum picture seems to be roughly indicated on a stool. Moreover, Flinck experimented here with light and shadow in the form of washes. The composition of the Rijksmuseum Isaac Blessing Jacob, however, is closer to that in the Catherijneconvent painting rather than the drawing, in that the space indicated between the bed and the picture plane has been negated. By placing the bed and Isaac’s coat flush with the picture plane, and by using life-size figures, Flinck has increased the dramatic intensity of the Rijksmuseum scene.²⁹

In addition to retaining the size and general composition of the earlier painted version, Flinck made much greater use in the Rijksmuseum picture of a technique only present in the savoury meat in the Catharijneconvent Isaac Blessing Jacob, namely the juxtaposition of small blotches of different colours to create a mottled effect. In the later work he also employed it in the fur trim of Isaac’s coat and in Rebecca’s cloak, which include small traces of red and blue, as if reflected from Isaac’s red coat and blue shirt. Despite the great differences between the two versions, the presence of this technique in the Catharijneconvent painting, albeit to a lesser degree, is one reason conjecturing a date for it not too long before 1638. Other indicators are the aforementioned similarities in composition and the figure of Jacob, which apparently had a common model. So Bruyn’s suggestion that the picture in the Catharijneconvent should be dated before 1633, the year in which he believes Flinck was apprenticed to Rembrandt, does not seem very likely.³⁰ A preliminary investigation into Flinck’s technique has concluded, moreover, that there are similarities to other works executed in Amsterdam.³¹ While most recent scholars assign the earlier version to between around 1633 and 1635,³² Sumowski’s 1637 dating is more appropriate,³³ and can be supported by comparison with other paintings from 1636 and 1637. The doughy, broad and superficial treatment of the draperies is similar to that in Flinck’s Shepherd in the Rijksmuseum and its pendant, the Shepherdess in Braunschweig,³⁴ as well as the 1637 Portrait of a Man Aged 44 in the Hague Mauritshuis.³⁵ Jacob’s excessively smooth face and deeply blushing cheeks are also features in these pictures, as are the frizzy rendering of his hair and Isaac’s beard. When compared to the earlier Isaac Blessing Jacob, and, indeed, to the dated works of 1636 and 1637, the present one indicates that Flinck’s abilities as a painter improved enormously in 1638.

This astonishing transformation cannot be chalked up entirely to Rembrandt’s influence, however, as certain aspects of the Rijksmuseum picture, such as the mottled painting technique, do not have parallels in his oeuvre. The very colourful palette and the ‘decorative calligraphic outlines’, as Blankert aptly formulated it, are also unique to Flinck.³⁶ A vexing question relating to Flinck’s two versions of Isaac Blessing Jacob is whether or not he followed a Rembrandt prototype. No such painting has survived, but there is, of course, the possibility it is no longer extant.³⁷ A number of drawings of the subject have been attributed to Rembrandt, and Sumowski has argued that one of them, in particular, was Flinck’s model, claiming that Benesch’s dating of it to around 1640-42 is too late.³⁸ Indeed, its composition, although reversed, is remarkably close to that of the Rijksmuseum scene, and Rebecca’s placement behind Isaac and the proximity of the bed to the picture plane, in particular, make Sumowski’s suggestion appealing. There are also obvious parallels in the costume details, such as the cloak and the skullcap worn by Isaac and Rebecca’s headscarf. The position of the table with the still life and the use of the curtains of the bed as a framing device, not to mention the minor detail of the tassel at the upper right corner of the pillow, also correspond. A model for this drawing, and Flinck’s paintings of the subject, was probably an engraving from around 1579 after a design by Maerten de Vos.³⁹ Jacob’s pose in Flinck’s earlier version in the Catharijneconvent may have been derived from this print, which was perhaps also the source for such costume elements as Jacob’s coat with its short, open sleeves, and Rebecca’s headscarf worn over a cap.

In the Middle Ages a deeper theological significance was given to the story of Isaac’s blessing. Instead of considering Jacob to be the guilty party, he was seen as the personification of the Christian Church, who in receiving Isaac’s blessing succeeded above Esau as representative of the Jews and the old dispensation.⁴⁰ For Calvin and the authors of the marginalia for the official Statenbijbel, the fact that it had been prophesied to Rebecca that ‘Two nations are in thy womb [...] and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder will serve the younger’ (Genesis 25:23) made the Old Testament tale a paradigm of the doctrine of predestination. Although the identities of the original owners of Flinck’s two versions of Isaac Blessing Jacob are not known, nor whether the works were painted on commission, it seems safe to assume that this Calvinist take on the story does not inform Flinck’s compositions. He himself came from a Mennonite family and his clientele in Amsterdam was, as far as we know, primarily made up of Mennonites and Remonstrants. Neither of those religious affiliations subscribed to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. A Mennonite patron would probably have viewed the pictures in the light of Menno Simons’s interpretation of the story, which drew a parallel between Jacob, who was blessed by Isaac and was ‘hated and persecuted by his carnal, fierce brother, Esau’ and ‘true Christians [...] blessed through our true Isaac, Christ Jesus’ and ‘maliciously hated and persecuted to death by their carnal and licentious brethren’.⁴¹

Jonathan Bikker, 2023

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements