Christ and the Samaritan Woman

In 1927 the London collection of Robert and Evelyn Benson, a banker and his wife who had been buying early Italian pictures since the 1880s, was sold in one block to the dealers Duveen Brothers. Among the pictures were four small scenes by Duccio, cut long before from the base of his great altarpiece for Siena Cathedral, and soon all four had crossed the Atlantic. This one went to the Rockefeller collection in New York and stayed there until Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza bought it in 1971.

The story is from the Gospel of John. Christ, tired from the road, sits on the edge of Jacob's well and asks a Samaritan woman for a drink. She tells him he has nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Duccio put the means for it in her hand. Besides the jug balanced on her head, she holds a coil of white rope and a small copper bucket. On the right, the apostles are coming back out of the town gate with the food they had gone to buy. The gold of the sky has worn thin, and the red clay it was laid over shows through in streaks and scratches.