After Willem Van Herp

Watermark: none visble through lining.
An inscription on the verso gives this sheet to the French artist Claude Vignon, although Paola Pacht Bassani rejected the attribution in her catalogue raisonne and noted its northern character, suggesting Leonaert Bramer as a possible author. It is, in fact, after the work of an obscure artist from Antwerp, Willem van Herp the Elder. Van Herp generated canvases of biblical subjects with a factory-like regularity, many of these ended up in Spanish collections, facilitated by his collaborator, the dealer Matthijs Musson.
This study of a figure group with the young Moses trampling on the crown is directly connected to a painting of the subject that came up for auction at Christie's London in 1989. The scene shows pharaoh's daughter, who raised Moses, before Pharaoh. He has placed his crown on the child's head and Moses has thrown it down and trampled on it, foreshadowing his future triumph over Pharoah. The story is not in the bible but was related by the Jewish historian Josephus. In van Herp's painting the group with Moses, Pharaoh's daughter, and her retinue appears in the right foreground while opposite them, a Jewish elder intervenes with an alarmed pharoah. Van Herp is a rarely recognized draftsman, perhaps because he easily changed modes and worked quickly and repetitively. Jahel Sansalazar does not find the style of the sheet consistent with van Herp's draftsmanship, affirming that it is a copy after the painting rather than a preparatory study by the artist.