Moses Saved from the River

In September 1638, after more than 20 years of a childless marriage, the queen of France gave birth to the future Louis XIV. That same year in Rome, Poussin painted Pharaoh's daughter finding the Hebrew baby at the edge of the Nile, and the canvas would end up with that boy 55 years later. It belonged to André Le Nôtre, the gardener who laid out Versailles, and in 1693 he gave it to Louis along with two other paintings by Poussin.

Poussin never went to Egypt. His Nile is a bearded river god reclining on the left, with a pyramid on the right and an arched bridge crossing the water behind the women. The critic André Félibien, who knew Le Nôtre's pictures, noted it simply as a small Moses found in the waters, painted in 1638. It is the first of Poussin's paintings of the scene, and he came back to it in 1647 and again in 1651.