The Child Moses on the Nile
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Exodus 2:3
The passage
And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.
Exodus 2:3
About this plate
Night on the river. Reeds close in on both sides, the water is almost black, and the small ark of bulrushes floats in the middle with the child inside it. Above, half dissolved into the cloud, winged figures lean out of the sky and look down. A bird crosses the moonlight at the upper left.
It is one of the darkest plates in the Bible and one of the quietest. Doré has taken a scene usually painted in daylight with a princess and her maids and moved it back several hours, to the part nobody illustrates: the basket alone on the water in the dark, before anyone has found it.
The angels are barely drawn. They are made of the same strokes as the cloud, and if you glance at the plate quickly you will read them as weather. That ambiguity is deliberate. Exodus does not mention them, so Doré leaves you free to see nothing but sky.
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