Moses and His Ethiopian Wife Zipporah

Jacob Jordaens painted Moses and His Ethiopian Wife Zipporah around 1650, depicting the biblical episode from Exodus 2 and Numbers 12 in which Moses's marriage to an Ethiopian (or Cushite) woman provoked his siblings Aaron and Miriam to challenge his spiritual authority. The subject was unusual in painting and suggests a specific commission with particular thematic interests; it also gave Jordaens occasion for a multi-figure composition with figures of varying ages and expressions responding to the central couple. By this late period of his career, Jordaens's style had achieved the summary confidence of old age: assured, somewhat looser than his middle period, but possessed of the complete command of figure composition and warm coloring that had characterized his work for decades.

The interracial couple is rendered with Jordaens's characteristic warm, full-bodied figural style, the rich coloring and vigorous brushwork creating a scene of marital intimacy unusual in 17th-century painting.