被大利拉出卖的参孙

Rembrandt was still in his early twenties, working in his home town of Leiden, when he painted this around 1628, well before the great Amsterdam commissions. He picks the instant just before the disaster. Samson lies asleep across Delilah's lap, and she twists round, one finger raised to his hair, signalling to the Philistine soldier who creeps in from the shadows with his shears ready. Rembrandt keeps the whole drama in the light, a bright pool on the sleeping man and the tense faces while everything else sinks into brown dark. The picture was fine enough to enter the collection of the House of Orange, the Dutch ruling family, within a few years. It later hung in Berlin for a long stretch under another painter's name before it was given back to Rembrandt.