Josef und die Frau des Potiphar

This is early Murillo, painted in Seville around 1640, before he became the city's most sought-after painter of tender Madonnas and street children. The subject is older and harsher, from Genesis: Joseph, a slave in the house of the Egyptian official Potiphar, is cornered by his master's wife, who tries to pull him into bed. He breaks away and runs, and she is left clutching his red cloak, the evidence she will use to accuse him falsely. Murillo stages it as loud domestic drama in a curtained bedchamber, the woman half-rising from tangled sheets with her arm thrown after him. It is a large canvas, nearly two and a half metres wide, and one of the few Old Testament stories the young painter ever took on.