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

Entry

The landscape in this painting has been convincingly attributed to the Haarlem artist Cornelis Vroom by both Keyes and Biesboer.²⁰ Keyes compared the lighting to that in Vroom’s 1630 River Panorama in Schwerin (fig. a) and the trees to those in a drawing in Hamburg,²¹ and the 1638 Landscape with Waterfall, now in Haarlem (fig. b).²² The rendering of the rock-faced riverbank and distant hill in the Haarlem painting is also very similar to that in the Rijksmuseum picture. Collaborative evidence is the fact that Vroom is documented as having painted the landscape in Bor’s no longer extant Triumph of Venus, part of the decorations carried out for Frederik Hendrik’s Honselaarsdijk palace between 1636 and 1638.²³ Vroom was also responsible for the landscape in a painting in Stockholm,²⁴ the figures in which have on occasion been attributed to Bor.²⁵ The Stockholm painting is, however, possibly the one mentioned in a number of 17th-century Haarlem inventories as a collaboration between Vroom and Jacob van Campen.²⁶

The ultimate source for the composition of the landscape, which is blocked off on the left by trees and has a distant panoramic view, is Adam Elsheimer’s Aurora.²⁷ However, Pieter de Grebber’s 1634 Finding of Moses.²⁸ was probably the immediate model for the diagonal figural composition set against a screen of trees. De Grebber’s painting might also have inspired Bor’s combination of light blue and gold in the drapery worn by Pharaoh’s daughter. But unlike this potential model, she merely looks on in the present painting as her maids occupy themselves with the infant Moses. This approach to the subject, as well as the two maids with their naked backs to the viewer, were possibly derived from Moyses van Wtenbrouck’s handling of the subject (SK-A-4673). The women in Bor’s painting, with their fat cheeks and neckless bodies, all appear to be cast from the same mould. This bizarre figure type owes as much to Wtenbrouck as it does to Van Campen and De Grebber.

There is a possibility that Pharaoh’s Daughter Discovers Moses was originally owned by Constantijn Huygens and hung in his house on Plein in The Hague. A 1786 inventory of the contents of this house made after the death of Huygens’s great-granddaughter, Susanna Louisa Huygens (1714-85), includes a painting with this title, although unfortunately the names of the artists who executed it are not recorded. The painting had presumably remained in the house, which was passed down to Constantijn Huygens’s descendants in a quite convoluted manner.²⁹ After the death of Susanna Louisa Huygens, the painting was, again presumably, sold with the house on Plein to Jacob Verheije van Citters and subsequently, in 1800, to Jonkheer Johannes Goldberg (1763-1828). An 1827 description of the house, in Goldberg’s possession at the time, mentions a Finding of Moses as an overdoor by Van Spreeuwen. The year after Goldberg’s death, the house was sold to the State. The painting was transferred to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst in The Hague three years before Huygens’s house on Plein was demolished in 1877.

Significantly, the possible original owner of the painting, Constantijn Huygens, and the artists who executed it, Bor and Vroom, were involved in the Honselaarsdijk project, as were Van Campen and De Grebber, who were so influential for Bor.³⁰ The years 1636-38, when that project was undertaken, give an indication for dating Bor’s painting. In his overview of Bor’s oeuvre, Von Moltke placed the painting at the end of the 1630s.³¹ Biesboer used the date of the completion of Huygens’s own house, 1637, as the probable date.³² Although his reasoning is difficult to follow, Keyes’s suggested date of about 1630 seems to be based on the date of Vroom’s landscape in Schwerin.³³ However, Vroom’s Landscape with Waterfall in Haarlem, which has more in common with the Rijksmuseum painting, is from 1638. Bor’s four dated paintings also provide little indication as to how this collaborative work can be situated chronologically. The fully evolved classicism of the Pretiose, Don Juan and the Gypsy Woman Maiombe of 1641,³⁴ does, at least, provide a terminus ante quem. Another indication is provided by the similarity between the long-haired figures and Bor’s single-figure depictions of women. These paintings are not dated, but it is known that Bor donated one of them to the Sint-Jobsgasthuis in Utrecht in 1631.³⁵ However, because De Grebber’s Finding of Moses seems to have been one of Bor’s models, its date of 1634 can serve as a terminus post quem.

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. 25.