Pharaoh’s Daughter Discovers Moses in the Rush Basket (Exodus 2:5-6)

Entry

Wtenbrouck’s earliest known treatment of the finding of Moses is a painting dated 1623.⁴ The present painting was undoubtedly executed later; the dating to around 1625 given in the announcement of its acquisition in 1976 can be fully endorsed.⁵ The composition with a river at the bottom and an inclining bank is most similar to Wtenbrouck’s 1625 Silenus and the Phrygian Peasant.⁶ Also similar is the vine-covered tree on the left of both compositions, which is cut off by the top edge of the picture. In both paintings the branches form a canopy for the figures. Weisner called this type of landscape in Wtenbrouck’s oeuvre ‘heroic Italian’. A salient feature in the Amsterdam painting is the use of Roman ruins in the background.⁷ Such landscapes and the types of trees and vegetation that appear in them were undoubtedly inspired by the work of Jacob Pynas and Claes Moeyaert. Like his 1627 Triumph of Bacchus in Braunschweig⁸ and other works by Wtenbrouck from the mid to late-1620s, the landscape is composed of planes, beginning with a diagonally placed row of figures in the foreground. Alternating bands of light and shadow reinforce these planes. Precisely in the same manner as the Braunschweig Triumph of Bacchus, the secondary figures in the Rijksmuseum painting are cast in shadow. The sturdy figure types are also indicative of Wtenbrouck’s production in the mid and late-1620s, and differ remarkably in scale from the staffage in his earlier and later landscapes. This figure type, as well as the primary colours of their drapery, can also be traced back to the Pre-Rembrandtists. Indeed, Wtenbrouck’s depictions of the Triumph of Bacchus in Braunschweig and Kassel⁹ both dated 1627, were probably inspired by Moeyaert’s 1624 painting of this subject.¹⁰ Wtenbrouck, however, seems to have had knowledge of one of Moeyaert’s own models, Annibale Carracci’s fresco in the Palazzo Farnese.

There is also a possibility that a work, Landscape with Women Bathing from around 1618,¹¹ by another Bolognese classicist, Guercino, might have inspired Wtenbrouck’s Pharaoh’s Daughter Discovers Moses in the Rush Basket. Guercino’s painting shows a similar diagonal arrangement in the foreground, and has a river at the bottom of the composition and a tree on the left. In his painting as well, women, whose poses can be compared with Wtenbrouck’s foreground nudes, are seen emerging from the water. A diagonally placed parapet, adorned with a sphinx in the Amsterdam painting, is also present in Guercino’s composition. The similarities with the work by Guercino may be purely coincidental. On the other hand, the Dutch artist could have seen this painting or a similar one if he did, indeed, travel to Italy. Another possibility is that the Landscape with Women Bathing, a small work that could be easily transported, entered a Dutch collection early on.¹²

At any rate, the comparison with Guercino’s non-biblical scene highlights the exceptional nature of the Rijksmuseum painting, which does not immediately reveal its true subject matter to the viewer. At first glance, one is put in mind of depictions of Diana and her Nymphs Bathing. Significantly, Wtenbrouck made an etching of this subject,¹³ and a painting of a related subject by him is recorded in an early 18th-century sale catalogue.¹⁴ It is only on closer inspection that one detects the sphinx and the head of the tiny Moses between the two voluptuous nudes in the foreground. The amount of female nudity Wtenbrouck introduced in this depiction of Pharaoh’s Daughter Discovers Moses in the Rush Basket was unique at the time, and would never be truly paralleled in the 17th century (although Cornelis van Poelenburch¹⁵ and Paulus Bor (SK-A-852) are examples of artists who did come close). A number of Wtenbrouck’s undated prints show nudes in similar poses to those in the present painting.¹⁶

A copy of the Rijksmuseum picture was in Kunsthaus Schloss Ahlden in Ahlden/Aller in 1983.¹⁷

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 349.