Abram's Counsel to Sarai

Abram's Counsel to Sarai of 1896, in the Jewish Museum, illustrates the episode in Genesis in which Abram, entering Egypt with his beautiful wife Sarai, advises her to say she is his sister rather than his wife, fearing that the Egyptians will kill him to take her. The episode is morally complex — Abram protects himself at potential cost to his wife — and has been debated by commentators across the centuries. Tissot's Old Testament project engages with the full moral complexity of the narratives, not only with their heroic or devotional aspects. His treatment of Abram and Sarai emphasises the intimacy of the counsel — a private domestic moment charged with anxiety about the imminent encounter with Egyptian power.

Gouache on cardboard, with Tissot's archaeological attention to dress and setting. The Egyptian context requires him to deploy his Near Eastern visual vocabulary — the landscape approaching Egypt, the dress of desert travellers, the anxiety of people entering a foreign power's territory. The intimate compositional focus on two figures in conversation is characteristic.