Jacob and Joseph’s Coat: the Biblical Realism of Ford Madox Brown

They then dip Joseph's multicolored tunic in the blood of a kid and show it to their father in an attempt to convince him of his son's accidental death. Brown focuses on the moment of confrontation between the two groups: the diagonal of the tent divides the patriarch, gathered with his family in the half-light, from the deceitful sons, whose ambiguous nature is revealed in the sunlight.

A host of details characterizes the roles and intentions of the figures: Simeon nervously tightens his sandals as a sign of false deference, while Judah secretly watches his father's desperate reaction. The youngest son, Benjamin, emerges from the half-light to inspect the tunic, while Jacob's niece directs a hostile gaze at the group of men. At the center of the composition, the dog intent on sniffing the bloodstains and recognizing their non-human origin foreshadows the breaking of the deception. In Levi's simian features. For Brown, the Bible was a source of historical and narrative episodes to be reconstructed philologically. To lend truthfulness to the subject, the artist consulted books and objects at the British Museum, borrowed African fabrics belonging to Rossetti, and modeled the background on a landscape of the Holy Land painted from life by the artist Thomas Seddon.