Christ and the Woman of Samaria

At Jacob's well, outside the Samaritan town of Sychar, Christ asks a woman for a drink. The Gospel of John says she was surprised, since Jews and Samaritans kept apart, and in the conversation that follows he tells her who he is, and she goes back to the town to say she has met the Messiah. Veronese sets the meeting in an evening landscape, and the museum praises how well the two figures convey attentive listening. He painted it around 1585 with his workshop, one of a set of large canvases of the same size, and its likely partner is another scene at a well, Rebecca at the Well, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. There, too, a stranger asks a woman for water, the servant Abraham had sent to find a bride for his son Isaac.