One suspects, though, that on the road Sally Hemings may have also figured in his imagination. In Düsseldorf, Jefferson was fascinated by a 1699 painting of Abraham taking the young servant Hagar to his bed, an image by the Dutch artist Adriaen van der Werff.75 The picture, Jefferson said, was “delicious.76 I would have agreed to have been Abraham though the consequence would have been that I should have been dead five or six thousand years.”
