The Prophet of Bethel Meets the Man of God from Judah (1 Kings 13:14-18)

The plain-weave canvas support has been lined. Cusping is present on all four sides. Although not clearly visible, the ground layer is probably grey.

Fair. A line is present on the right side of the picture, indicating that the canvas has been folded. The red mantle worn by the prophet and the foliage of the trees are abraded. There are rather many discoloured retouchings on the right side of the picture, in the area of the river and the ruins.

...; ? collection J. Blom, Haarlem;¹¹Coll. cat. 1960, p. 154, no. 1293....; sale, Kasteel Biljoen, collection Peltzer, portraits from a noble family in The Hague, private collection (Amsterdam) [not section Kasteel Biljoen], Amsterdam (F. Muller), 28 October 1918, no. 149, fl. 1,650, to the museum; on loan to the Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam, since 1971

ObjectNumber: SK-A-2814

The biblical story depicted here is a frightful one involving disobedience, gullibility and deceit. The man of God from Judah, who had preached in Bethel, was tricked into accepting a prophet’s invitation to eat and drink in his house, thereby unwittingly disobeying God’s command not to return to Bethel (I Kings 13:11-22). As the result of his disobedience, he was killed by a lion after leaving his host. Lambert Jacobsz shows the moment in the story when the old prophet of Bethel lies to the man of God from Judah claiming that an angel had commanded him to bring the latter back to Bethel to eat and drink in his house (I Kings 13:18).

This scene had already been used for the staffage in some 16th-century Dutch landscape paintings, but it was Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert’s series of engravings after Maarten van Heemskerck showing four episodes from the story of the man of God that became a source for the Pre-Rembrandtist painters.³³Van Gent 1991, p. 100. Moeyaert’s painting of the invitation scene has been dated to around 1627 by Astrid Tümpel, that is two years before Lambert Jacobsz’s.⁴⁴Claes Moeyaert, The Prophet of Bethel Meets the Man of God from Judah, c. 1627, Capetown, South African National Gallery; Tu¨mpel 1974, p. 256, no. 80 (ill.). As in the Coornhert engraving, the man of God is seated on the ground beneath an oak tree, and the prophet of Bethel stands beside him. Unlike Coornhert’s engraving, Moeyaert’s composition is horizontal in format, and includes a landscape view on the right. Jacobsz seems to have followed the basic composition of the Moeyaert painting. Unlike Moeyaert, though, Jacobsz has included only the two main protagonists in the foreground, and has used the tree and bushes as a screen behind the figures. The prophet of Bethel sits on the ass and points to the way he came, the road that leads to his house. Jacobsz’s manner of depicting the story, therefore, also differs from Moeyaert’s, as Moeyaert’s prophet of Bethel points upward, alluding to the angel who he (falsely) claimed told him to invite the man of God to his home.

Van der Meij-Tolsma has argued that Lastman’s 1624 Abraham and the Three Angels was the specific source for the composition of the present painting, as well as for the pose and physiognomy of the man of God.⁵⁵St Petersburg, Hermitage; Van der Meij-Tolsma 1988, pp. 38-39, fig. 4. While the man of God does indeed resemble the Abraham in the 1624 Lastman painting, the pose of Jacobsz’s figure is closer to that of the figure in Coornhert’s engraving. The compositional type, with a few figures shown in the left foreground close to the picture plane before a screen of trees, and a distant landscape view on the right, was already employed by Jacobsz in his earliest dated work, the 1624 Rest on the Flight into Egypt.⁶⁶Leeuwarden, Stedelijk Museum Het Princessehof; illustrated in Sumowski IV, 1994, p. 3906, pl. 2308. The general influence of Lastman and Moeyaert is also apparent in such features of the present painting as the Italianate landscape, and the use of intense, local colours – violet, crimson, pink – for the figures’ robes. Jacobsz’s simplified drapery style is closer to that of Moeyaert than of Lastman.

Jacobsz also depicted another episode from the biblical story of the man of God. However, that painting, showing The Chastisement of the Man of God,⁷⁷Formerly Lund, Universitets Konstmuseum; illustrated in Van der Meij-Tolsma 1988, p. 45, fig. 8. was executed in Jacobsz’s other manner, with large, half-length figures in a composition similar to that of Caravaggio’s London Supper at Emmaus.⁸⁸The National Gallery; see Van der Meij-Tolsma 1988, pp. 44-46.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 154.

Van der Meij-Tolsma 1988, p. 39; Van Gent 1991, p. 100; Huys Janssen in The Hague 1992a, pp. 188, 191

1920, p. 218, no. 1293a; 1934, p. 146, no. 1293a; 1960, p. 154, no. 1293; 1976, p. 304, no. A 2814; 2007, no. 254

J. Bikker, 2007, 'Lambert Jacobsz., The Prophet of Bethel Meets the Man of God from Judah (1 Kings 13:14-18), 1629', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.9397