Joseph in Prison Interpreting the Dreams of Pharaoh’s Butler and Baker

Entry

Joseph, sold by his brothers and put into prison through the machinations of Potiphar’s wife, is interpreting the dreams of the Egyptian pharaoh’s butler and baker (Genesis 40:1-19). He tells the butler that within three days he will be restored to favour by the pharaoh and reinstated in his function, but the baker’s dream means that within three days he will be hanged. On the fingers of his left hand, the young Joseph is counting the three days that remain until the butler’s release. The butler is seated on the ground, listening with amazement, but the standing baker has yet to be told of his fate. The basket on the ground alludes to Joseph’s eventual appointment as the pharaoh’s chief administrator, in charge of storing up the harvest in the good years in preparation for subsequent years of famine.

Rembrandt has characterized the facial expressions particularly well: Joseph confidently interpreting the butler’s dream, the butler clutching his head as the news gradually sinks in, and the baker waiting passively to hear the interpretation of his dream. The composition of the drawing is very simple, almost symmetrical, and depicts only the figures and their relationship to one another. Aside from the bale of straw at the lower left, the prison cell is barely indicated. The pen lines are drawn irregularly with several contrasts in tone, and the forms have been concisely depicted with little detail. Rembrandt used a very dry pen for the hatched shading.

Joseph in Prison dates from the early 1650s. In a drawing of the same subject by Rembrandt of circa 1639, on the verso of a double-sided sheet in the British Museum in London (inv. no. Gg,2.248 verso),² it is the baker who is being addressed by Joseph and is reacting to the interpretation of his ill-fated dream. Unlike the Amsterdam drawing, the figures in the London drawing are seated at the bottom of a staircase, an indication of the dungeon setting. Joseph’s authority is conveyed not through his face (in shadow from the wash penetrating through from the recto), but rather by his erect bearing. A similar arrangement, with Joseph standing or half-leaning against a low wall and both of the other prisoners seated, this time without much indication of setting, can be seen in another early drawing of the subject by Rembrandt, datable perhaps just after the London sheet, in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (inv. no. 95.GA.18).³

Rembrandt may have borrowed the motif in the Amsterdam sheet of Joseph counting on his fingers from Lucas van Leyden’s print of the theme from his series of five engravings of the Story of Joseph (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-1595).⁴ This print may also have been the source of the details of the baker’s flat cap and the butler’s plumed hat in the London drawing, which are not so clearly drawn in the Amsterdam drawing. Several drawings of the subject now assigned to Rembrandt pupils show that they were inspired by their master’s drawings, as well as by Lucas’s print. For instance, three drawings previously given to Rembrandt by Benesch are now all considered to be by pupils. Two are probably by Govert Flinck, one in The Art Institute of Chicago (inv. no. 1967.144)⁵ and the other formerly on the Amsterdam art market and now in a private collection;⁶ the latter is closer to the present composition, in reverse, with a pyramidal arrangement showing Joseph seated in profile, talking to one prisoner, while the other stands in the background, leaning his elbow against a ledge. As I first suggested in 1985, the third school drawing of the subject accepted by Benesch, in an American private collection,⁷ is probably by Ferdinand Bol, as, too, is a version of the theme in the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg (inv. no. 22412), which was also once thought to be by Rembrandt.⁸

Rembrandt’s earlier drawings in the British Museum and the Getty seem also to have been the models for several paintings by or attributed to Rembrandt pupils, including one in the Staatliches Museum in Schwerin (inv. no. G 65),⁹ another in a private collection in Amsterdam, now widely accepted as by Govert Flinck,¹⁰ one signed and dated 1643 by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout in the Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery in Greenville (SC) (inv. no. P.63.328.26)¹¹ and, finally, one signed and dated 1648 by Jan Victors in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (inv. no. SK-A-451).¹²

By contrast, the later Amsterdam sheet seems clearly to have served as a source for other drawings in the style of Rembrandt.¹³ These borrowings illustrate how Rembrandt’s drawings were used by his pupils, for whom biblical scenes of this kind were probably specifically made.

Peter Schatborn, 2017