One of the National Gallery’s most famous pictures restored to new life

The National Gallery now has on display the newly restored Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph (c. 1620) by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, better known as Guercino.

This is a baroque masterpiece with an interesting history, for it was the very first painting purchased by Sir Denis Mahon, the connoisseur and scholar in 1934 for £120. He made the artist an object of  particular study which was a central achievement of his life. The picture was presented to the NGI in 2026, but had to be sent to the Getty Museum in Los Angles for restoration.

The painting now glows with energy and passion, illuminating the  moment described in Genesis 48. The exhibition material fills out the process of the creation of the painting, its acquisition by Sir Denis, and the restoration.

The painting was commissioned by Cardinal Jacopo Serra, the Papal legate in Ferrara. In 1623 it passed to his successor, who twenty years later gifted it to a Spanish nobleman.  It eventually vanished from sight in 1859, but was rediscovered by a German art historian in Paris in 1932, two years later becoming the property of Sir Denis. Such are the curious misadventures of great works of art.

But it struck this reviewer that the blessing of Ephraim and Manassas is one of the incidents in scripture and legend around which the British Israelite movement fabricated the strange belief that the British (as the descendants of Ephraim) and the United State (as descendants of Manassas) where the true heirs to Israel – one of the strangest Christian cults of the last two centuries, yet one followed by Queen Victoria and other members of the British Royal family; evidence that religious belief too can have strange misadventures.

Alas these days  many pictures of this kind are closed off to some extent from modern viewers as they are no longer so deeply steeped in the Bible as their ancestors were.

The restoration process is described in great detail. But the viewer is struck too by how the process described is one that applies to many aspects of our lives: to see the truth in its original state we have to remove layers of dirt, varnish, and pious repairs to a crumbling fabric. Revived paintings of this kind carry lessons not only for the art experts, but in fact for all of us, in other parts of our lives.  P.C.

The exhibition, in the Hugh Lane Room (Room 31), runs until May 27.