Pharaoh's Daughter Receives the Mother of Moses

Pharaoh's Daughter Receives the Mother of Moses of 1896, gouache on cardboard at the Jewish Museum, illustrates the moment in Exodus when Moses's mother Jochebed is brought before Pharaoh's daughter to serve as the infant's wet nurse — unrecognised as his actual mother. The narrative contains an extraordinary irony: the mother saves her condemned son by placing him in the Nile, is then hired to nurse the child she has just relinquished, and watches him grow up in the very palace that decreed his death. Tissot's Old Testament illustrations treat such episodes with the same Near Eastern archaeological seriousness he brought to the New Testament. Egyptian setting, costume, and court ceremonial were carefully researched, and Tissot produced some of the most archaeologically specific Egyptian illustrations of any Victorian artist.

Gouache on cardboard, the work requires Tissot to render an Egyptian court interior with the visual vocabulary he derived from Egyptological sources — hieroglyphs, architectural columns, royal dress. His compositional habit of placing a few key figures in the foreground against a richly detailed background is fully operative here.