Moses Striking Water from the Rock

Moses striking water from the rock is among the great Old Testament images of divine provision, and Jan Steen's 1651 treatment is one of his earliest ambitious religious compositions. The subject was popular with Dutch painters as a typological prefiguration of Christ's provision of living water. Steen's version draws on Italian and Flemish compositional precedents—a crowd scene with architectural landscape—but renders the assembled Israelites in the costumes and physiognomies of his Dutch contemporaries, as was conventional in Reformed religious painting.

Steen organizes the composition around Moses at the rock face, with the crowd arranged in a semicircle that draws the viewer's eye toward the emerging water. The landscape setting is handled with more care than his domestic interiors, using depth recession and aerial perspective. Figure groupings show Steen's early ambition toward history painting conventions.