The Art World - Brotherhood

Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Jacob and His Twelve Sons.”

- Peter Schjeldahl

The Frick Collection has a surprise for us: a room-filling loan show of “Jacob and His Twelve Sons” (circa 1640-45), thirteen full-length, life-size imagined portraits, all but unknown in the United States until now, by the Spanish master Francisco de Zurbarán. Twelve are from the dining room of Auckland Castle, in the small northeastern English town of Bishop Auckland, and one, reuniting the suite, is from another English collection. They constitute a terrific feat of Baroque storytelling: movies of their day. All the characters—each a distinct personality uniquely posed, costumed, and accessorized, and towering against a bright, clouded sky and a low swath of sylvan scenery— appear to be approximately as old as they are in the forty-ninth chapter of Genesis. There the dying Jacob prophesies, in gorgeous verse, the fates of the founders-to-be of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Some will fare better than others: poorly, in the case of the eldest, Reuben, “unstable as water,” and in the cases of the second and third, Simeon and Levi, “for in their anger they killed men,” and very well indeed in those of Judah, from whom the “sceptre shall not depart,” and— of course—Joseph, “a fruitful bough” once sold into slavery by his brothers and subsequently their benefactor as the overlord of Egypt. (No, I haven’t read Thomas Mann’s tetralogy, “Joseph and His Brothers”—to my acute and, on deadline, irremediable regret. Note to friends: please stop telling me how wonderful it is!) The show enthralls in numerous ways.