FRANÇOIS BOUCHER
(FRENCH, 1703-1770)
Joseph Presenting His Father and Brothers
to the Pharaoh
c. 1723-26
Oil on canvas
Today, Francois Boucher is known mostly as the leading
exponent of the French Rococo. It was not biblical subjects,
but sensual mythologies, ornate decorative subjects, and
flattering portraits of the élite that would earn him the title
premier peintre du roi (first painter to the French king) in
1765. This painting is thus a valuable artifact of the earliest
and still least-understood part of Boucher’s career, before
his trip to Italy in 1728 and before he joined the French
Academy of Beaux-Arts in the early 1730s.
The work’s documentary history attests to this uncertainty:
first identified as the ancient Roman subject The Continence
of Scipio, it was then confused with the Old Testament
Christian scene Evilmerodach Releases Joachin From Prison, a
now-untraced painting that won Boucher the Prix de Rome
in 1723.1 Several ancient subjects share the iconography of
a sovereign handing down a ruling to an assembled crowd,
but the particular details of this painting most closely parallel
the story of Joseph presenting his father to the pharaoh
recounted in Genesis 47: 1-10.2 Joseph’s brothers, jealous of
his father Jacob’s favor and fearful their brother will usurp
them, plot to kill him but ultimately sell him into slavery.
Yet the prophetic and clever Joseph triumphs over his bleak
circumstances. Taken to Egypt as a slave, he quickly wins
the trust of the pharaoh and his officials and eventually
becomes a governor. Boucher depicts the great scene of
reconciliation after Joseph forgives his brothers and reunites
with his beloved father. Joseph, identifiable by his turban,
introduces the pharaoh to the 130-year-old patriarch and five
of the brothers, shepherds holding their staffs. The family
tells of the famine that has driven them out of their native
Canaan, and the pharaoh welcomes them: “The country of
Egypt is open to you: settle your father and brothers in the
best region.”3
Joseph Presenting his Father and Brother to the Pharaoh
shows a young artist grappling with a complicated, multi-
figure composition. The elderly Jacob occupies the center
of the picture, drawing the viewer’s eye to the charged
space among his greeting hand, Joseph’s presenting hand,
and the Pharaoh’s offering hand. The vivid palette and
theatrical setting—including the architectural backdrop
with its twisted, Solomonic columns and slice of bright blue
sky—betray the influence of Venetian models.4 The sketchy
quality of the oil paint application, especially in the faces of
the background figures and the drapery behind the throne,
shows Boucher working out forms directly on the canvas,
wet-on-wet.
A second, more finished version of this painting, probably
executed later and with more figures included on both sides,
is in a private collection.5
By Anna House
1. As The Continence of Scipio, Sotheby’s London, 20 May 1953, lot 90; as Evilmerodach Releases Joachin from Prison,
Herman Voss, “Boucher’s Early Development – Addenda,” The Burlington Magazine vol. 96 no. 616 (July 1954): 204;
206-10, fig. 17. Andor Pigler was the first to dispute the identification with Evilmerodach: Pigler, Barockthemen, vol. I
(Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1956), 89. Additional bibliography: Soullié and Masson, “Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre peint
et dessiné de François Boucher,” in François Boucher, by André Michel (Paris, 1906), no. 700; Alexandre Ananoff and
Daniel Wildenstein, Francois Boucher (Lausanne and Paris, 1976), no. 9; Colin Eisler, Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress
Collection: European Schools excluding Italian, vol. 4 (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1977), cat. K2148 fig. 281 p. 315-6.
2. Alastair Laing, Pierre Rosenberg, and J. Patrice Marandel, eds., Francois Boucher, 1703-1770 exh. cat. (New York: The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), 99; the CMA’s painting is cat. 5., p. 99-101.
3. Genesis 47: 5.
4. Boucher (as in no. 2), 99.
5. Letter from J. Patrice Marandel to Stephen Mazoh of 24 November 1994, CMA file.
Columbia Museum of Art