Cristo e a Samaritana

Rembrandt made this small oak panel toward the end of the 1650s, the worst stretch of his life in money terms. In 1656 he was declared insolvent and a notary walked through the house on the Breestraat listing everything in it, down to the shells and the armour. The contents were auctioned over the next two years, and in 1658 the house went too. The scene is Christ resting at a well in Samaria and asking a local woman to draw him a drink, a conversation across a line that Jews and Samaritans did not usually cross. He came back to the subject more than once. The signature at the lower right still reads as his, but the year beside it has worn down to a few strokes, which is why the catalogues do not agree on when it was painted.