The Finding of Moses

In December 1902, the British contractor Sir John Aird stood at the opening of the first Aswan Dam, a project his own firm had built across the Nile, and he brought the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema along. Aird then paid him 5,000 guineas to bring back an Egyptian subject, and Alma-Tadema chose the infant Moses, carried in procession from the river as the pharaoh's daughter looks on. Every detail, the tiled floor, the flowers, the hazy sky, reflects the archaeology-hungry Egypt that Edwardian Britain was busy exploring. Taste turned against this kind of picture within a generation. In 1935 it sold for just 820 guineas. In 2010 the same canvas fetched nearly 36 million dollars.