Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Jacob's Farewell to Benjamin
Follower of Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669)
c. 1655
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 113 × 110.5 cm (52 9/16 × 43 1/2 in.); Framed: 161 × 139.1 × 8.6 cm (63 3/8 × 54 3/4 × 3 3/8 in.)
- Culture
- Netherlands
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Wilson L. Mead Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions violence, death or gore. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
This scene of kinship between men has been interpreted as the biblical figure Jacob granting permission to his youngest son, Benjamin, to travel with his brothers to Egypt. The artist, an unknown follower of Rembrandt van Rijn, conveyed Jacob’s ambivalent emotional state by presenting the boy with his back to the viewer. Rembrandt and his followers treated this subject many times, as the Protestant art market in the Dutch Republic valued scenes of faith and loyalty but lacked the Catholic interest in martyrdom.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
