The finding of Moses

In the Book of Exodus, Pharaoh orders the Hebrew baby boys drowned, and one mother hides her son in a basket among the reeds of the Nile, where Pharaoh's daughter finds him. Painters usually showed that moment at the riverbank. Jan Victors, working in Amsterdam in 1653, chose a rarer scene that comes a little later. The baby's sister offers to fetch a Hebrew woman to nurse him, and she brings back his own mother. So the woman feeding the child here is Moses's mother, while the princess who rescued him sits beside her and watches. In the Bible, the princess even pays her wages. Victors painted Old Testament stories again and again, and the Dresden gallery suggests some were made for wealthy Jewish merchants in Amsterdam, though that remains an assumption. He signed and dated this large canvas at the lower left.