The Scouts Carrying the Grapes

The story comes from the Book of Numbers. Moses sends men ahead to spy out the land of Canaan, and they return with a single cluster of grapes so heavy that two of them carry it on a pole between them. Here the two scouts trudge through a landscape of bare trees, a palm and old stone walls, the fruit swinging from the pole and the man in front twisting round to look back and up. Franz Sigrist the Elder painted the scene in oil, in shades of grey on paper, and the Belvedere dates it after 1755. Like its companion sheet of Moses striking the rock, it served as the model for an engraving, and the museum bought the two together in 1962 in London. Centuries later Israel's Ministry of Tourism took the same pair of scouts and their load as its emblem.