The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (The Repose of the Holy Family in Egypt)

The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (The Repose of the Holy Family in Egypt)

William Blake

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Having fled Judea to escape the persecution of King Herod, the Holy Family here rests on their way to Egypt. Blake places them within a lyrical landscape lit by the setting sun and indicates their destination with distant pyramids. Since the biblical text that mentions this journey includes few details, Blake drew upon established devotional traditions to compose the scene. The Virgin seated on the ground to nurse the infant Christ recalls the Renaissance type of the Madonna of Humility. The enormous, sheltering palm tree is described in the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew as having bowed its branches to furnish the travelers with fruit, and the donkey is derived from a seventeenth-century engraving of the subject.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (The Repose of the Holy Family in Egypt)The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (The Repose of the Holy Family in Egypt)The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (The Repose of the Holy Family in Egypt)The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (The Repose of the Holy Family in Egypt)The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (The Repose of the Holy Family in Egypt)

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.