Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Graceful, elongated figures and vibrant color characterize the Mannerist style embraced by Hendrik de Clerck, a court painter to the archdukes of Brussels. This scene, based on Exodus 2:7–8, illustrates the concept of royal benevolence. The Hebrew baby Moses, hidden in a basket in the Nile to prevent his death following an Egyptian decree that Israelite male infants should be slain at birth, has just been discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter. Moses’s sister, Miriam, gestures toward their mother, Jochebed, who kneels beside the basket. Pharaoh’s daughter, seated in the center, not only allows Jochebed to nurse the infant but also pays her—a slave—to do so. Although the story takes place in Egypt, de Clerck has set the scene in a northern European forest, the landscape with which his Habsburg patrons would have been most familiar.