Mosè esposto sul fiume

Poussin painted this in 1654, near 60 and long settled in Rome, for the French collector Jacques Stella, an old friend. Most painters who took up the Moses story chose its happy end, Pharaoh's daughter discovering the baby in the reeds. Poussin picked the harder moment just before, when the child's own parents set him adrift on the Nile to save him from the order to kill Hebrew sons, and he built the whole picture around their grief. Everything is weighed and placed like a piece of ancient history reconstructed, the still river, the measured landscape, the figures arranged as if on a low stage. Contemporaries admired above all the way he painted the reflections in the water.