Nicolas Poussin, a French painter, was highly influential in the formation of French classicism in the arts. He spent most of his life in Rome, Italy, and from the 1640s, he produced works mainly aimed at amateurs in Paris. He left about 18 paintings focusing on the life of Moses as depicted in the Old Testament. Among these include The Finding of Moses, which he painted for the Parisian silk merchant Jean Pointel, and The Exposition of Moses, which he created for Jacques Stella, a French painter and old acquaintance. These works depict two episodes related to the birth of Moses as well as feature a sphinx as an attribute of the River God of the Nile. In these works, Poussin rendered two noticeably different types of sphinxes for each recipient. For Pointel, he concealed typological meanings in the Egyptian sphinx to embody prophesies from the Old Testament, whereas for Stella, he depicted the statue of a lion along with the statue of Moses in the fountain of the Acqua Felice( one of the aqueducts of Rome), in which he included syncretistic connotations while drawing on the works of Kircher. The relationship between providence of nature and fortune indicated in this particular work is a theme that Poussin dealt with through his so-called ideal landscape. Therefore, he sent this work to Stella, who understood his paintings more than anyone else, in order to receive critical appraisal.
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