Thamar et Juda

Thamar and Judah from around 1826 at the Musee Magnin treats the Old Testament story with the dramatic narrative skill Vernet brought to all subjects. Biblical narratives provided alternatives to his military specialization. As a painter deeply committed to visual journalism, Vernet sketched campaigns from direct observation and was renowned for his ability to render horses, soldiers, and battle formations with unmatched clarity and energy. Horace Vernet's Oriental subjects combined his personal experience of North Africa (he visited Algeria during the French colonial campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s) with the Romantic fascination with the Islamic world as a theater of both contemporary military adventure and ancient Biblical history. His Algerian paintings documented the French colonial campaign while participating in the Orientalist tradition of European painters who found in the North African landscape and culture the visual stimulus that Delacroix had found in Morocco. The combination of journalistic documentation and Romantic imagination that characterized the best Orientalist painting of his generation was Vernet's particular specialty.

The biblical scene is rendered with warm palette and dramatic handling. Vernet's narrative skill creates a vivid scene of Old Testament drama.