The scene in the foreground shows Esau selling his birthright to his brother Jacob for a bowl of pottage. In the background, Isaac blesses Jacob (Genesis 27:1-29). Received by the museum as a Paulus Moreelse in 1942, the painting was considered a copy after a print (RP-P-OB-5354, see fig. a) by Willem van Swanenburgh II in the 1976 catalogue of the Rijksmuseum’s painting collection and more recently by Domela Nieuwenhuis.3 According to the inscription on Van Swanenburgh’s print, which reads ‘P. Moreelse invent. 1609 // W. Swanenburgh sculp. et exc.’, Moreelse was responsible for the design. Neither a drawing nor a painting of this subject by Moreelse now exists. The composition of Van Swanenburgh’s print is in the same direction as that of the present painting, which indeed suggests that it served as the copyist’s model. It cannot be ruled out, however, that there once was a painting by Moreelse and that the design for Van Swanenburgh’s print was reversed in order to retain the direction of the composition in that painting. Significantly, the present painting does not follow the print in all aspects; the architecture is somewhat different and a window with a view onto some houses has been placed behind the figures of Jacob and Esau.4 The print shows more of Jacob’s drapery on the left, but the lack of cusping on this side of the painting indicates that the canvas was probably cut down here. More telling, is the fact that, although qualitatively not up to Moreelse’s standards, the painting reproduces Moreelse’s style; the copyist would not have been able to create an imitation of Moreelse’s style from Van Swanenburgh’s print. Jonathan Bikker, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 222.