Christ and the Samaritan Woman

By 1637 Artemisia Gentileschi had settled in Naples, then one of the biggest cities in Europe, and was running a busy workshop turning out large canvases for demanding patrons. This is one of them. The subject is a gospel meeting at a well, where Christ asks a Samaritan woman for water and ends up talking with her as an equal. Painters usually showed her sitting quietly while he lectured. Gentileschi does the opposite and leans her forward into the conversation, gesturing, arguing back, fully part of the exchange. A letter survives in which the artist was trying that same year to sell a Woman of Samaria to Cardinal Francesco Barberini in Rome. Behind the two figures she opens out a rare full landscape, the disciples small in the distance walking back from the town.