Christ and the Samaritan Woman

In the Gospel of John, Jesus, tired from the road, sits down by Jacob's well in Samaria at midday and asks a woman who has come for water to give him a drink. She is taken aback, because Jews and Samaritans kept apart, and the conversation that follows turns on living water. Bourdon painted the scene in Paris in the 1660s for the abbé de Saint-Georges, probably Claude de Saint-Georges, a churchman who would end his career as archbishop of Lyon, and he painted it as one of a pair. Its companion, also in Boston, shows Rebecca and Eleazar, the Old Testament meeting at a well where Abraham's servant finds a wife for Isaac. Bourdon tied the two pictures together. Each is built around a well, with a long band of figures across the front, and when they hang side by side the pair is closed at either end by a woman carrying a water jar on her head. The two main figures are singled out by the gestures of the people around them and, unusually, by the quiet colours of their clothes among the bright costumes of everyone else. A century later this canvas belonged to Louis-François de Bourbon, prince de Conti, and it was sold after his death, in 1777.