Rebecca at the Well

In 1613 the Flemish nobleman Charles de Croy, Duke of Arschot, died, and the clerks listing his pictures described this one as a woman with half-bare arms, an old man, a dwarf, a Moor and several camels. It was one of ten matching biblical canvases made in Venice in the 1580s, the last decade of Veronese's life, and nobody knows who ordered them or for what building. Within 20 years of the painter's death they were already in the Low Countries. The Duke of Buckingham bought the set in 1619 for his London house. In 1650 the Habsburg archduke Leopold Wilhelm bought it in Antwerp for his brother, the emperor Ferdinand III, and it went to Prague Castle, and later to Vienna. How much of it is Veronese's own hand and how much his assistants' has been argued for over a century, and the National Gallery now catalogues it as Veronese and workshop. The scene is from Genesis. Abraham's steward has found Rebecca at a well and knows her as the bride meant for Isaac, and a kneeling servant holds up the betrothal gifts. Vienna sold the painting in 1952, but seven of its companions stayed there, among them Christ and the Samaritan Woman, another meeting at a well.