Moses and the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai

Artist Jan de Bisschop (Dutch, 1628 - 1671)

Date17th century

MediumBrown ink and wash over traces of black chalk on paper

DimensionsUnframed: 17 3/16 × 23 1/16 inches (43.66 × 58.58 cm)
Framed: 27 × 33 × 1 inches (68.58 × 83.82 × 2.54 cm)

Credit LinePurchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust

Object number44-29/5

On View

Not on view

Collections

European Art

Terms

Exhibition History

Scenes from the Hebrew Scriptures, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, August 2-September 18, 1983, no. 37, as The Dance around the Golden Calf.

Dürer to Matisse: Master Drawings from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, June 23-August 18, 1996; The Cummer Museum and Gardens, Jacksonville, FL, September 20-November 29, 1996; The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, December 21, 1996-March 2, 1997, no. 30, as Moses and the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai.

Dürer to Matisse: Master Drawings from the Permanent Collection, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, July 12-September 6, 1998, no. 84, as Moses and the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai.

Saints & Sinners, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, January 15-December 13, 2020.

Gallery Label

Jan de Bisschop was a lawyer and amateur draftsman who founded a drawing academy in The Hague. He was instrumental in disseminating the influence of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque styles throughout the Netherlands. This ambitious drawing of Moses accepting the Ten Commandments from God on Mount Sinai is a copy after one of the 16th-century-style mosaics that make up the pavement of the Cathedral of Siena, Italy. De Bisschop's distinctive, gold-brown ink wash, later called "bisschops-ink" after him, is used here in combination with black chalk and highlights created by letting the surface of the paper show through.

Provenance

Valerius Röver (d. 1731), Delft;

Inherited by his wife née van der Dussen (d. 1760);

Hendrick de Leth (1703-1766), Amsterdam;

Goll van Francken;

G. and W. van Berckel;

J. van der Marck;

M. Neyman, Amsterdam, by 1776;

Sold, Catalogue d’une Belle Collection de Dessins…rassemblé avec soins & dépenses, par M. Neyman, Basan, Paris, July 8-11, 1776, lot 72, as Une Grande and fuperbe compolition, d’a-pres J. Romain, Reprefentant Moyfe recevant les tables de la loi fur le mont Sinai;

Johan Waldemar de Rehling Quistgaard (1877-1962), New York, by August 1, 1944;

Purchased from Quistgaard by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1944.

Published References

Baccheschi, Edi and Giuliano Briganti, L'opera completa del Beccafumi (Milano: Rizzoli, 1977), 99-100, (repro.), as ‘Storie’ di Mose sul Monte Sinai.

Ross Taggart and Edward Paul Cohn, Scenes from the Hebrew Scriptures (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1983, no. 37), 12, 29, (repro.), as The Dance around the Golden Calf.

J.G. Van Gelder, “Jan de Bisschop: 1628-1671,” Oud Holland 86, no. 4 (1971): 201-259, 261-288.

Roger Ward, Dürer to Matisse: Master Drawings from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1996), 110-11, (repro.), as Moses and the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai.

Roger B. Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 170, (repro.), as Moses Receiving the Law.

Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 79, (repro.), as Moses and the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai.

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