Poynter took three years to paint Israel in Egypt, which illustrates a passage from Exodus (Chap 1 v 8) describing how the enslaved Israelites were used to build the store-cities of Phitom and Raamses. He depicts dozens of slaves dragging a red granite lion, lashed by an overseer shaded by his black servant. In the foreground a fallen slave is given water; at the rear of the procession an Egyptian princess shaded by a parasol holds up her small son. Ahead, another lion is about to disappear through a distant half open doorway flanked by four colossal figures. A row of identical lions is visible in the unfinished courtyard beyond, with an empty base for one of those now being dragged in.
Poynter - the son of an architect - combines an eclectic collection of buildings and monuments from different sites and periods, depicting them individually with meticulous accuracy. Drawn both from published sources and actual monuments, they include the Great Pyramid from Giza, the temple and other buildings from Philae, the Obelisk from Heliopolis, and the Pylon Gateway from Edfu.
The colossal back granite figures are based on those in the British Museum of Amenhotep III from Thebes. The Nubian lion is also in the British Museum, while rows of similar lions had been exhibited in the Egyptian Court at the Crystal Palace in 1854. Although some critics found its subject disagreeable and objected to the archaeological inaccuracy of combining elements found so far apart in reality, the picture was a spectacular success on its exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1867.
It was bought by the engineer Sir John Hawkshaw who is said to have observed that there were not enough slaves to move the weight of the stone lion, and when the exhibition ended Poynter added a few more, as well as some priests and other figures.