Joseph in the Pit Oil on canvas 1947 Photograph Petra van der Wal ©Christopher Campbell-Howes Private collection
Here is poor Joseph, youngest of Jacob's sons and his father's favourite. If he's unfamiliar through reading of Genesis, Chapter 37, he's reasonably universally known though the late 1960s musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Evelyn's picture above is the second of a trilogy of paintings illustrating crucial moments in the Joseph story. The first is Joseph's Dream, begun in about 1937 and analysed here, and the third is Joseph in Prison, completed some 12 years later.
Joseph's brothers, destined to found the 12 tribes of Israel, detested Joseph bitterly, partly because of his favoured family standing and partly because of his boastfully egocentric dreams. The brothers plotted to kill him, but were dissuaded from murder by the eldest, Reuben, who suggested that they should let nature take its course by robbing him of his coat of many colours and throwing him into a pit, where he would certainly die of starvation or be eaten by a wild beast.
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Shortly after World War 2 Evelyn went with her husband Roger Folley to the Yorkshire dales, a walking expedition which included exploring Gordale Scar, a massive limestone ravine, possibly a collapsed cave. Has she invoked Gordale Scar as the backdrop for Joseph's discomfiture? Was this the trigger for the continuation and completion of Evelyn's long-considered Joseph trilogy?
Joseph in the Pit is unique in a curious way. It's the only painting in her entire canon (we exclude minor works like mice climbing Lake District mountains) which features mountainous scenery in the form of bare unyielding rock, with not the slightest hint of any form of growth or hint of regeneration, in which the hand of man hasn't intervened to work the land. So Joseph is condemned to die...apparently.
Joseph in the Pit is unusual, if not quite unique, in another way: it's another of the very few paintings, I believe 7 in all, in which the principal subject is looking out beyond the frame, searching, regretting, identifying, welcoming something of the greatest personal or general significance. Here Joseph, stripped of everything apart from a sort of undershirt, looks despairingly upwards for any sign of help. Maybe Evelyn, as she often did, had a line of a Psalm handy as she conceived the design of her painting, perhaps Psalm121: I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help, in the 17th century diction she loved.
And of course help did come, in the form of a band of desert nomads who discovered Joseph, hauled him up, took him to Egypt with them and sold him as a slave. He never looked back.
Text ©Christopher Campbell-Howes 2023. All rights reserved.
by Christopher Campbell-Howes
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