Abraham serving the three Angels

According to Genesis 18:1-19, Abraham sat at a tent door in the middle of the day when three angels appeared to him who prophesied that he and his wife Sarah would have a child, despite their old age. The prophecy was fulfilled when their son Isaac was born. This forcefully executed sheet depicts the moment that the angels appear to the elderly Abraham, here at right. The attribution to Ferdinand Bol was recently proposed by Peter Schatborn, to whom we are grateful, on the basis of a comparison to a drawing showing the Dream of Jacob in the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie de Besançon and three other sheets that display similar broad and rapid line work (see W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, New York, 1984, I, nos. 92, 212, 249, 256 and 257, ill.).