01 work, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Reginald Arthur's Pharaoh's Daughter, with Footnotes, #184

Reginald Arthur

Pharaoh's Daughter, c. 1896

Oil on canvas

101 by 51cm., 40 by 20in.

Private collection

Estimate for 30,000 - 50,000 GBP in July 2016

Pharaoh's Daughter appears to depict the un-named heroine of Exodus who discovered the infant Moses among the bulrushes when she was fetching water from the Nile. It was a popular subject in the nineteenth century and the most famous depiction of her was painted by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Arthur's picture was painted eight years before Alma-Tadema's but has the same exotic glamour that inspired the early pioneers of cinema and may have been inspired by contemporary opera or theatre. More on Pharaoh's Daughter

Pharaoh, becoming alarmed at the increasing power and numbers of the Israelites in Egypt, ordered that every male child who might be born to them should be cast into the river, and drowned. But the wife of a man named Levi felt that she could not give up her baby, and for three months she hid him.

When she could hide him no longer, she prepared a basket of rushes, and coated it with pitch, so that it would float upon the river and keep out the water. In this ark she placed her infant son, and hid the ark among the flags and bulrushes on the river-bank, and set the child's sister to watch it.

Now it happened that the daughter of Pharaoh came with her maidens to bathe in the river; and when she saw the basket she sent one of her maids to fetch it. And when she looked at the child he wept, and she had compassion for him, and said, "This is one of the Hebrews' children," she said. Then the child's sister, who was watching, came forward and said to Pharaoh's daughter, "Shall I call to thee a Hebrew woman that she may nurse the child for thee?" And when the princess said, "Go!" she, the little sister of Moses, went and called her own mother, to whom Pharaoh's daughter said, "Take this child and nurse him for me, and I will give thee thy wages." More The Finding of Moses

Reginald Arthur lived at 47 Bedford Square, very close to the British Museum and was greatly inspired by its classical treasures; one of his earliest exhibits was entitled A Bit from the British Museum. Egyptian subjects seem to have been his speciality and among his finest works are The Death of Cleopatra and Joseph Interpreting Pharaoh's Dream. More on Reginald Arthur

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