"The First Plague: Water is Changed into Blood"

Tissot lived in in Paris and then   London where he made many etchings, dry-points, and mezzotints, as well as paintings.  In the late 1870s he also became interested in the craft of cloisonné enameling.

Tissot returned to Paris. He struggled for a time to regain his former popularity but was not entirely successful. In 1885, after a mystical experience, he determined to illustrate a life of Christ. He took a number of trips to the Holy Land and produced some 350 watercolours of New Testament subjects, which were published in two volumes.

This painting was done in watercolor, sometime before 1903.