The Dutch-born, London-based orientalist painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema depicted the tenth plague of Egypt twice. A first treatment of the theme, The Sad Father, was created in 1859, but the canvas was later trimmed as apparently it didn’t satisfy the artist (Mason 2020: 220). The later version discussed here, painted one year after the première of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida and thus in the midst of an Ancient Egypt craze, repeats the ‘Pietà’ formula and some Egyptian decorative elements present in the earlier painting, but otherwise proposes a wholly novel mode of storytelling. 

Alma-Tadema frequently depicted Egyptian motifs and scenes, and his knowledge of that culture was vast, so that he could refer in his works to a ‘multitude of archaeological references’, many of which he encountered at the British Museum (Moser 2020: 197). Notable in this painting is the inclusion of a cartouche of Ramses II, connecting the scene to the specific Exodus episode it depicts, as that Pharaoh’s reign ‘was the period in which Moses … was placed by nineteenth-century scholars’ (Mason 2020: 221).

Beyond specific details, the painter seeks here to adopt the hieratic style of Egyptian art: the frontal, majestic, and massive central figures are passively, though nobly, contemplating the catastrophe as a fait accompli, rather than participating in any form of action. The living and the dead all share this static position, enhancing the impression that although only the firstborn were singled out for killing, the final plague meant the fall of an entire society. Any hint at dramatic commotion is relegated to the painting’s margins, where marginal characters are paradoxically allowed more agency: musicians, shaven-headed prostrate subjects—possibly priests—and, in the upper right-hand corner, Moses and Aaron themselves. The latter are not only the human vehicles of the disaster, but also, in the case of Moses, the ‘narrator’ who in Exodus 11 describes the coming plague and who here, as if proleptically, sees the consequences of his realized prophecy.  

References

Mason, Peter. 2020. The Modernists that Rome Made: Turner and Other Foreign Painters in Rome XVI–XIX Century (Rome: Gangemi Editore)

Moser, Stephanie. 2020. Painting Antiquity: Ancient Egypt in the Art of Lawrence Alma Tadema, Edward Poynter and Edwin Long (New York: Oxford University Press)