Hirah in Search of Tamar

The title names a moment most people have never heard of. It comes from a strange chapter of Genesis: Judah has promised a young goat to a veiled woman by the roadside, not realising she is Tamar, his own daughter-in-law. He sends his friend Hirah to deliver the animal and settle the debt, but when Hirah asks the local men where the woman has gone, she has vanished. That awkward errand is all the excuse the painter needed. What fills the canvas is not the scandal but the countryside, a wide, low landscape of the Veneto foothills, with shepherds, flocks and a traveller on the road catching the last warm light. Coming from the circle of Jacopo Bassano, it treats a biblical text the way this workshop usually did, as a doorway into the fields and animals they painted best. Hirah, the man on his fruitless walk, is easy to miss.