Laban searching Rachel's tent for his stolen images

In this large-scale painting, Jan Victors, who may have studied with Rembrandt around or before 1640, depicts a Biblical scene recounted in the Book of Genesis chapters 29-33. The text relates how Jacob fell in love with his cousin Rachel when he saw her watering her father's sheep at the well in Haran. Laban had two daughters, the beautiful younger sister Rachel and the older, 'rheumy eyed' Leah. Laban agreed to a marriage between Jacob and Rachel on one condition: that Jacob tend Laban's flock for seven years. Jacob dutifully served his time but, on his wedding day, Laban gave him Leah, promising him Rachel after seven further years of servitude. Jacob worked for another seven years, all the while secretly planning to return to Canaan with both of Laban's daughters, their children, and their possessions. Victors depicts the moment in the story when Laban, after having discovered their departure and Rachel's theft of his household idols, pursues them to the Mount of Galaad, seen here through the opening in the tent, and accuses Jacob of having stolen them. Rachel has hidden them under her saddle, refuses to rise and says to her father, 'Do not take it amiss, sir, that I cannot rise in your presence: the common lot of women is upon me.'

As Debra Miller suggested in her dissertation on the artist (op. cit., p. 72), Victors appears to have derived his depiction of Rachel from a 1622 painting by Pieter Lastman, Rembrandt’s master, which is today at Le Château-Musée, Boulogne-sur-Mer (fig. 1). Much as in Lastman’s painting, Victors’s female protagonist sits on a mound of hay, her hand supporting her turbaned head, directing her attention towards her father. In both paintings, her bare feet emerge from beneath a long skirt that hugs her legs.

Lastman’s painting must have been well known among the artists in Rembrandt’s circle. It appears to have been the starting point for the pre-Rembrandtist Claes Moeyaert in a painting of 1647 in the Detroit Institute of Arts (inv. no. 57.17), while the figures of Rachel and Laban in a drawing by an anonymous artist in Rembrandt’s orbit in the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden, datable to the 1630s, also has recourse to Lastman (inv. no. C 1304). The latter's painting must have been readily accessible in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, for it subsequently appears in the estate auction of Henrietta Popta (1671-1695) held in Amsterdam on 5 April 1697.

Miller (op. cit., pp. 70ff), Volker Manuth (op. cit.) and Werner Sumowksi (op. cit.) have all proposed the painting dates to the early 1650s. As Manuth has pointed out, the facial features of the figure of Jacob in this painting are particularly close to those of David’s seated brother in Victors’s Samuel anointing David, which is dated 1653 (Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum).