His head is bowed, his hand raised to his chin.
Bible in art · Amos
The Prophet Amos
Gustave Doré · 1866 (designs for La Sainte Bible, Tours); this printing 1873–1874
National Library of Poland, Warsaw
Like several other prophets in Doré’s Bible, Amos is a single standing figure: no event, only a man and a landscape. The lines move from the dense hatching of the cloak to the pale streaks of an evening sky; the signatures are trimmed off this copy.
Wrapped in a long hooded cloak, Amos leans on a staff on a rocky height, head bowed, hand at his chin. Below opens a wide valley with a stream and the pale walls of a town. A prickly-pear cactus grows from the rocks at the left.
From the text
- “I was not a prophet,” Amos says, “nor was I the son of a prophet” (Amos 7:14)
- “I was a herdsman and a tender of sycamore-fig trees” (Amos 7:14)
- “Go, prophesy to My people Israel” (Amos 7:15)
The artist’s own
- No flock and no fig trees: Amos alone, deep in thought
- A prickly-pear cactus, a plant from the Americas that grew all over the Holy Land in Doré’s day but not in Amos’s time
- A valley with a stream and town walls below
Details
Amos
The staff
He leans on a long staff planted in the rock.
Cactus
Flat, round pads of a prickly pear grow from the rocks.
Town walls
Pale walls stand by the water in the valley.
Gustave Doré, French, 1832–1883. National Library of Poland (Biblioteka Narodowa), Warsaw — «Pismo Święte Starego i Nowego Testamentu», vol. 2, Warsaw: M. Glücksberg, 1874 (acc. 75.267 A) · Wood engraving after Gustave Doré’s design · National Library of Poland (Polona): the record of the volume gives the licence «Domena Publiczna» (Public Domain), «copyrightProtected»: false; the scan was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by the library itself («Polona Upload», GLAM-Wiki partnership: “This file was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons as part of a GLAM-Wiki partnership between the National Library of Poland and Wikimedia Polska”), linking its Polona record.