Moses Laid Amid the Flags

Moses Laid Amid the Flags of 1896, in the Jewish Museum, illustrates the moment in Exodus when Moses's mother Jochebed places the infant in a basket of reeds and sets it among the bulrushes of the Nile, to save him from Pharaoh's decree that all male Hebrew infants be drowned. Tissot brings to this founding episode of the Moses narrative the same combination of Near Eastern geographical realism and emotional gravity that characterises his entire Old Testament project. The Nile setting — its specific reeds, birds, water quality, and the Egyptian landscape beyond — is rendered with care. The act of a mother placing her child in the water, in the hope that he will be found and saved, is one of the most emotionally concentrated moments in the Hebrew scriptures, and Tissot treats it with corresponding seriousness.

Gouache on cardboard, with careful attention to the Nile's specific vegetation and the quality of light on water. The basket and its placement among the reeds are observed with the documentary precision that Tissot applied to all the specific objects and actions of his biblical scenes. The figure of the mother and the secondary presence of Miriam watching from a distance are the compositional focus.