Public Domain
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
The museum dates the canvas to 1626 and reads it as the scene from the twenty-fifth chapter of Genesis in which Esau comes home hungry from the hunt and sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for a dish of lentils — the museum’s German title means “Esau sells his birthright”. Ter Brugghen, born in Deventer in 1588 and dead in Utrecht in 1629, had studied under Abraham Bloemaert in Utrecht and then spent the years 1604 to 1614 in Italy, where the gallery records that the art of Caravaggio made a deep impression on him; it counts him today among the leading masters of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, the Dutch painters who carried that manner home. The gallery bought the painting in 1926 from Wilhelm Meyer, in Hamburg.