Samson and Delilah

Rubens had not long been back from eight years in Italy when, around 1609, he took a commission from Nicolaas Rockox, a friend and burgomaster of Antwerp, for the story of Samson betrayed. This little panel in Cincinnati is not that finished picture. It is the oil sketch he made first, the small full-colour model shown to the patron for approval before studio hands enlarged the design onto a big canvas. That large version now hangs in London. The whole composition is already here, Samson asleep in Delilah's lap while an old woman holds a candle and a man leans in to cut his hair. A Haarlem engraver, Jacob Matham, turned this sketch into a print around 1613, and that print records small differences from the London painting. For decades those differences have fed a genuine argument among scholars over how much of the London canvas Rubens finished with his own hand.