Summary

Tapestry, wool and silk, 5 warps per cm, The Meeting of Joseph and Jacob in Egypt from a set of five of The Story of Jacob, Southern Netherlands, c. 1550-1600. The setting is a landscape with distant mountains. In the foreground Jacob, wearing a yellow cloak decorated with stars, embraces his son Joseph. They are watched by a group of soldiers on the left and by three men, probably three of Joseph’s brothers, on the right. To the right of the main figures, descending from the hills, is a party of men with extensive flocks of sheep and cattle and baggage animals, representing Jacob with Joseph’s brothers and their families coming into Egypt from the land of Canaan. In the distance at the top right is a large complex of buildings, probably representing Pharaoh’s palace. The tapestry has borders on all four sides of bunches of fruit and flowers with small figures and scenes in between them, including figures of Fame at the lower corners, scenes with the goddess Diana hunting in the centre of the side borders, and in the upper and lower borders a man on horseback, allegorical figures of Prudence holding a snake and a mirror, Meleager killing the Caledonian Boar, a man playing a lute, and boys holding baskets of fruit.

Full description

The setting is a landscape with distant mountains. In the foreground Jacob, wearing a yellow cloak decorated with stars, and his son Joseph, meet and embrace. They are watched by a group of soldiers on the left (probably Egyptians accompanying Joseph) and by three men, almost certainly three of Joseph’s brothers, on the right. To the right of the main figures, descending from the hills, is a party of men with extensive flocks of sheep and cattle and baggage animals, representing Jacob with Joseph’s brothers and their families coming into Egypt from the land of Canaan. In the distance at the top right is a large complex of buildings, probably representing Pharaoh’s palace. The tapestry has borders on all four sides of bunches of fruit and flowers with small figures and scenes in between them, including figures of Fame at the lower corners, scenes with the goddess Diana hunting in the centre of the side borders, and in the upper and lower borders a man on horseback, allegorical figures of Prudence holding a snake and a mirror, Meleager killing the Caledonian Boar, a man playing a lute, and boys holding baskets of fruit. This is the fourth tapestry in the 'Jacob' set at Powis, and shows the reunion of Jacob and his son Joseph in Egypt, as related in Genesis chapter 46. Joseph was the second youngest of Jacob’s sons, and the first son of Rachel, the wife whom he loved the most. When Joseph was seventeen he had a dream which predicted that his brothers would all bow down to him; they were jealous of him, and plotted to get rid of him by throwing him into a pit and then selling him into Egypt. Joseph was sold into Egypt, and his brothers took the many-coloured coat that his father had made him and dipped it in blood, to make Jacob think that Joseph had been killed. Jacob mourned heavily for his son. Meanwhile Joseph arrived in Egypt and his employer soon saw that he was a good man, and made him the head of his household; he eventually rose to the position of master of Pharaoh’s house, by interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams predicting seven years of plenty and seven years of famine. When the years of famine began men from all the nearby lands came to buy food from Joseph in Egypt, because he had kept great stores; this included his brothers, who travelled from the land of Canaan. Joseph recognized his brothers and eventually revealed himself to them, and asked them to bring his father and the entire family into Egypt. Father and son were finally reunited: “And Joseph made ready his chariot, and went up to meet Israel [i.e. Jacob] his father, to Goshen, and presented himself unto him; and he fell on his neck, and he wept on his neck a good while. And Israel said unto Joseph, Now let me die, since I have seen thy face, since thou art yet alive.” (Gen. 46:29-30). A tapestry with the same design formerly in the Swedish Royal Collection has an inscription in a cartouche in the upper border which identifies the scene as follows: IOSEP ACCEPIT PATREM SVVM IACOB IN EGIPTVM GENESIS XXXXVI. Jacob and his twin brother Esau were born when their parents were entering old age, having been married for twenty years. Esau was the first twin to emerge, and was hairy all over; Jacob emerged second, holding on to his brother’s heel. Esau grew up to be a hunter, but Jacob was a quiet man. Jacob bought Esau’s birthright (the right to be considered the firstborn) for a mess of pottage, and with the help of their mother Rebecca he deceived their ageing and blind father into giving him the blessing that was meant for Esau by dressing himself in goats’ skins to imitate Esau’s hairy arms. Esau was angry and resolved to kill his brother, so Rebecca arranged for Jacob to be sent away in search of a wife to the land of her brother Laban. The first tapestry in the series at Powis shows Jacob meeting Rachel, the daughter of Laban, for the first time. After serving Laban for twenty years and being deceived by him many times, Jacob finally left secretly, taking his four wives and twelve sons with him; the second tapestry shows Laban catching up with Jacob, and also Jacob meeting his brother Esau again. The third tapestry shows the rape of Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, by Shechem, an event which was followed by a bloody revenge meted out by Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi. Jacob’s second youngest son, Joseph, was to be the next patriarch and ruler of his brethren. As a young man Joseph was sold by his brothers into Egypt, and there he rose to a position of great power; the last two tapestries are set in Egypt, where finally Jacob and the rest of his sons joined Joseph. Jacob can be recognised in each tapestry as he wears a cloak decorated with stars, in reference to Genesis 26:4, where God appeared to Isaac and said “And I will make thy seed multiply as the stars of heaven, and will give unto thy seed all these countries; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” Jacob’s twelve sons were the originators of the twelve tribes of Israel. No makers’ marks are visible on any of the Jacob tapestries (although they may be present underneath the applied edging on some of the panels). John Böttiger suggested that a related series in a Swedish private collection may have been made in the Northern Netherlands (present-day Holland) by weavers who had emigrated from the tapestry-producing lands of the Southern Netherlands in the second half of the sixteenth century. However there is nothing to suggest that this is the case, and the set was almost certainly produced at one of the weaving centres in the Southern Netherlands (roughly present-day Belgium) such as Antwerp or Oudenaarde. Böttiger dated the Swedish series to the second half if the sixteenth century and the set at Powis can be dated to the same period. A set of five tapestries after the same designs was originally in the Swedish Royal Collection at the Castle of Kungsör. The set was sold in 1892 and by 1928 one of the tapestries had disappeared, and the other four were in three separate private collections in Sweden (Böttiger 1928, pp. 35-40). The subject of the first of the Swedish tapestries, ‘Jacob gathering his Wives before Fleeing the Land of Canaan’, does not appear in the Powis set, but the other three do: ‘Laban Searching for the Idols and the Meeting of Jacob and Esau’, ‘Jacob before Pharaoh’, and ‘The Meeting of Joseph and Jacob in Egypt’. The borders of the Swedish set have a similar overall structure to the Powis set with figures and scenes arranged between bunches of flowers, but some of the figures are different, the side borders are wider, and each tapestry has a cartouche in the upper border with a long inscription describing the scene. It is possible that the series as a whole included further scenes: the important events of Jacob’s early life, including Esau selling his birthright, and Jacob stealing Esau’s blessing, appear in many other sixteenth-century tapestry sets of the ‘Story of Jacob’. The tapestries cannot be definitely identified in the 1891 inventory of Powis, but in 1908 three from the set were in their current positions in the Duke’s Room (then ‘Her Ladyship’s Sitting Room’) described as “A King seated under a canopy on Audience” (‘Jacob before Pharaoh’), “The Meeting of Jacob and Esau” (‘The Meeting of Joseph and Jacob’), and “The capture of a city and its women” (‘The Rape of Dinah’) (Knight, Frank & Rutley 1908, pp. 52-53). A description of the Duke’s Room in 1917 indicates that the tapestries were originally at Lymore, and describes them in enthusiastic terms: “the rest of the wall space [in Lady Powis’s Sitting Room – formerly the Duke’s Room] is taken up by an oak chimneypiece, by two doorways, and by a set of three sixteenth century tapestries from Lymore, the ancient home of the Herberts of Chirbury. The manner of the doorways and wall hangings is excellently shown in the illustration […], and therefore needs no further description beyond saying that much of the charm of the tapestries arises from their colouring. They were in a cut and ravelled condition, but have been perfectly repaired and are but a little faded. The general tone is blue green, that being the colour of most of the trees and landscape. This harmonises perfectly with the full indigo of some of the clothing of the figures and the green grass of some of the foliage, but in the photography the latter stands out too distinctly as dark, while the former is too pale and imperceptible” (Avray Tipping 1917, p. 139). The 1930 Powis inventory records the three tapestries in the Duke’s Room with the same titles as in 1908, and values them collectively at £350, whilst two further tapestries described as “The Parting of Abraham and Lot” (£200) and “The Meeting of Jacob and Esau” (£150) were in the Gateway Room (Supplementary Inventory 1930, pp. 1, 3). (Helen Wyld, 2010)