Lines and Colors art blog

Eye Candy for Today: Alma-Tadema's Moses

The Finding of Moses, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
The Finding of Moses, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

The link above is to the file on Wikimedia Commons (click on their image for large version) though the image at top is from a version on WikiPaintings (click “Show Sizes” for larger versions). I think the latter image has better color, though it has been inexplicably flopped left to right (I’ve corrected it here).

The original is in a private collection. It was sold at auction today for a record price for 19th century European paintings (through Sotheby’s, though I can’t find the sale record on their new, poorly arranged website.)

Alma-Tadema worked on the painting for two years. The slaves do not look happy.


Comments

6 responses to “Eye Candy for Today: Alma-Tadema's Moses”

  1. Did they have delphinium flowers in ancient Egypt?

    1. cparker Avatar

      I think we need to take Alma-Tadema’s romanticized depiction with more than a grain of salt.

  2. Yeah, I’m gonna guess that those aren’t historic hairdos. Tadema was a storyteller, not an historian.

  3. Amazing realism on the figures, though, the facial expressions, and especially the baby–he looks like you could reach right into the picture and lift him out. Thanks for sharing.

  4. Moses didn’t have to be found; as a hungry three-month-old infant he was crying his lungs out. This is the amazing story: When she (Jochebed) saw how good?looking he was, she kept him concealed for three lunar months. When she was no longer able to conceal him, she then took for him an ark of papyrus and coated it with bitumen and pitch and put the child in it and put it among the reeds by the bank of the river Nile.Further, his sister stationed herself at a distance to find out what would be done with him.
    After a while Phar?aoh’s daughter came down to bathe in the Nile River, and her female attendants were walking by the side of the Nile River. And she caught sight of the ark in the middle of the reeds. Immediately she sent her slave girl that she might get it. When she opened it she got to see the child, and here the boy was weeping. At that she felt compassion for him, although she said: “This is one of the children of the Hebrews.”
    The glorious Delphiniums are a different unknown story, even though one variety is named BLUE NILE. The Greek Pedanius Dioscoride gave the plant its Latin name. http://www.blackmore-langdon.com/category/Delphiniums

  5. It’s amazing.Visual historical pictures.