Christ and the Samaritan Woman by Juan de Flandes

Christ and the Samaritan Woman by Juan de Flandes (1496–1504)

At the well

Christ stands on the left in a long, dark blue robe, barefoot, his brown hair falling to his shoulders. He faces us, calm, with one hand resting on the rim of a round stone well and the other held out a little in front of him, as if he has just spoken. The woman stands on the other side of the well. She wears a red dress with blue sleeves, a white apron tucked up at her side and a white cap, and she is bent over her work, pouring water from a wooden bucket on a chain into an earthenware jug at her feet. Her eyes are lowered; she has not yet looked up at him.

Over the well rises a tall wooden frame, with the ropes of the pulley hanging down into the shaft. It is the tallest thing in the picture and splits the panel between the two figures.

Behind them the ground falls away to a wide, pale landscape: a tree in autumn colours at the left, blue mountains and rocky peaks in the distance, birds in a clear sky. At the far left, half hidden by a rise in the ground, a small figure appears, perhaps one of the disciples who, in John's Gospel, return from the town and find Jesus talking with the woman.

The story

In the fourth chapter of John's Gospel, Jesus, tired from a journey through Samaria, sits by Jacob's well while his disciples go into the town for food. A Samaritan woman comes to draw water and he asks her for a drink. Their conversation turns to the living water that ends thirst for good, and to true worship. Juan de Flandes paints the start of it: an ordinary woman busy with an ordinary job, and a stranger at the well about to ask for water.

A queen's series of small panels

The panel is tiny, 24 by 17.5 centimetres, painted in oil on oak. It comes from a large set of small pictures that Queen Isabella the Catholic of Castile commissioned for the oratory of her castle at Toro. The French national museum database records forty-seven paintings in the series; the others are now dispersed, with groups in the royal collection in Madrid and in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Juan de Flandes, born in Flanders around 1460, is first documented in October 1496 in the accounts of Isabella's court. He was her court painter by 1498 and served until her death in 1504, which gives the range of dates for this panel. The English Wikipedia article notes that when Margaret of Austria showed the series to Albrecht Dürer in 1521, he praised the precision of the small paintings.

After the queen

When Isabella's estate was sold at Toro in 1505, this panel was inventoried as "La Samaritana" and bought by Diego Fernández de Córdoba, alcaide de los Donceles. After his death in 1518 it disappears from the record until it turns up in Paris, in the Warneck collection, which was sold at the Galerie Georges Petit on 27–28 May 1926. The Louvre bought it at that sale, and it is catalogued there as RF 2557.

After the queen's death, Juan de Flandes worked for churches: in Salamanca from 1505 to 1507 and then in Palencia, where a large altarpiece of his remains in the cathedral. He had died by December 1519, when his wife is recorded in Palencia as a widow.

About this print

Made from a photograph of the whole panel in its small upright format, enlarged so that details made to be seen at arm's length, such as the chain of the bucket and the stream of water into the jug, can be seen clearly.

Sources: Musée du Louvre, RF 2557, via the Joconde database (pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/joconde/00000081359) · Wikimedia Commons, File:Juan_de_Flandes_007.jpg · Inventario Nostra et Mundi, "Christ and the Woman of Samaria" (inventario.nostraetmundi.com/en/work/22) · Wikipedia, "Juan de Flandes"