Landscape with Judah and Tamar

On the back of this panel someone wrote HERIBLES F, giving it to Herri met de Bles, a landscape painter of the same generation. The front says something else. On the rock in the middle Lucas Gassel painted his monogram and the date 1548, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum follows the front.

The story comes from Genesis and plays out small in the lower right of a wide valley. Tamar, twice widowed within Judah's family and then refused his youngest son, veiled her face and waited by the road. Judah took her for a prostitute and left his seal, cord and staff as a pledge. Months later, when she was pregnant and he ordered her burned, she sent those three things back to him, and he admitted she was more righteous than he was. One of her twin sons, Perez, is named in the Bible as an ancestor of King David.