The Meeting of Jacob and Esau (Genesis 33)

Entry

Upon God’s command Jacob returned to Canaan, the land of his birth, after an absence of 20 years. There he met his brother Esau and his army of 400 men. Jacob was fearful that Esau would take revenge for Jacob’s theft of his birthright and their father’s blessing, but Esau ‘embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept’ (Genesis 33:4). The meeting of Jacob and Esau was a popular theme among Dutch history painters.⁴ As in the majority of works showing this meeting, Jacob kneels before the helmeted Esau, who embraces him. Jacob’s wives, Lea and Rachel, are also shown kneeling before Esau, while the sheep and goats in the left foreground represent the present Jacob brought his brother.

Conceived as a precious cabinet piece, the present painting was identified merely as ‘school of Elsheimer’ until Klessmann published it for the first time with an attribution to Bartholomeus Breenbergh.⁵ Klessmann compared the painting to two early works by Breenbergh (one of them being another attribution), which show the unmistakable influence of Jacob Pynas.⁶ Such elements as the oddly proportioned figures and what he considered to be the unconvincing collection of mountains, hills and bushes prompted Klessmann to disqualify Jacob Pynas as a potential candidate. Only two years after the publication of Klessmann’s article, Oehler placed the work in a group of paintings which she attributed en bloc to Jan Pynas.⁷ Oehler’s group, however, is not thoroughly homogenous; one of the paintings, The Preaching of John the Baptist, in fact, has been rightly identified by Keyes as the work of Esaias van de Velde.⁸ The only painting in Oehler’s group that is now universally accepted as a work from Jan Pynas’s hand is the Raising of Lazarus in Aschaffenburg.⁹

Another painting in Oehler’s group, Landscape with Christ Handing the Keys to St Peter in Bremen, has subsequently been attributed to Jacob Pynas.¹⁰ Jacob Pynas is also most likely the artist who executed the present painting. The bushy trees with many white highlights in the foliage in the background also appear in the Bremen painting, as well as a number of other works convincingly attributed to Jacob Pynas, such as Landscape with the Repentant Magdalen in Berlin (fig. a). While this type of foliage is also found in early works by Breenbergh, such as the Finding of Moses,¹¹ the other varieties of foliage present in the Rijksmuseum painting are only found in Jacob Pynas’s oeuvre. The clustered foliage of the central tree, as well as the fanned-out foliage of the secondary branches is very close to those in Landscape with Unidentified Old Testament Scene in Schloss Fasanerie, convincingly attributed to Jacob Pynas by Oehler.¹² In both works the tree-trunks are curved and grow diagonally. Each leaf of the repoussoir tree in the present painting has been individually described, an approach which is also apparent in two other works convincingly attributed to Jacob Pynas, Landscape with the Repentant Magdalen (fig. a), and Landscape with the Meeting of Moses and Aaron in Kassel (fig. b). Most of the figure types and drapery also compare well to the latter painting. It is only the elongated figures closest to the central tree in the Rijksmuseum that do not have a ready counterpart in Jacob Pynas’s reconstructed oeuvre. This might indicate that the present painting is one of his earliest works executed in the Elsheimer mode.

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. 251.