The Good Samaritan

Painting height: 243.8 cm
Painting width: 154.9 cm
Frame height: 284 cm
Frame width: 192 cm

This parable from the Gospel of Luke (Luke 10:25-37) tells the story of a despised Samaritan who took pity on an injured traveller left half-dead by robbers on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho. The Samaritan took care of the traveller's wounds and took him to an inn, whilst the traveller's own kinsmen, a priest and a Levite, refused to stop and help. Jesus told the story to encourage compassion. Watts painted three versions of the Good Samaritan, to pay homage to the philanthropist Thomas Wright, of Manchester. Wright devoted his life to helping ex-convicts re-establish themselves in society. In this version, Watts even lent Wright's features to the Samaritan, offering a striking image of physical and moral brotherly support.

Watts’s painting the Good Samaritan was intended to celebrate the great philanthropist Thomas Wright of Manchester (1789-1875), who worked tirelessly throughout his life for the possibility of prisoners to return to society after having served their sentences. The Good Samaritan in Watts’s painting is a portrait of Thomas Wright. Alongside his work as foreman of an iron foundry, Wright worked with convicts of Salford prison in 1838, and was able to dedicate himself to this work fulltime from 1852. This is an early work by Watts, and several sketchbooks and studies show how he laboured over the subject and experimented with its composition in two sketchbooks (COMWG2007.199 and COMWG2007.206). A Study from 1849 shows the two figures in a landscape with a mule on their left (COMWG2006.44, 1849), and the Samaritan wears different clothing as well. The sketch is closer to the version of the painting exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1850 which was presented to the Corporation of Manchester in 1852 (now in the Manchester Art Gallery). Watts was not the only painter to express his deep admiration for Wright and his work. The painters Captain Charles Mercier and John Dawson Watson also painted Wright’s portrait.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is told in the New Testament in the Gospel of Luke 10:25-37, and was particularly apt for illustrating the work of Thomas Wright. In the Gospel of Luke Jesus tells his followers about a man who travelled from Jerusalem to Jericho. On the way to Jericho the man was attacked by thieves. They stripped him, wounded him, and left him for dead (Luke 10:30). As he lay there two men did not stop to help him, rather the “godly” men crossed the road when they saw the injured man. However, when the Samaritan saw him he went to him with compassion. He tended his wounds, pouring oil and wine, and set him on his own ‘beast’ and took him to an inn where he paid the innkeeper to take care of the man until he had recovered (Luke 10:33-35). As Jesus asked, ‘Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?’ (Luke 10:36) The answer is of course the Samaritan, the man who showed kindness to the traveller in distress.

The painting in the Watts Gallery collection is another version of the same subject and presents the figures in a landscape painted in strikingly different colours of orange, red and green that recall Vincent Van Gogh’s The Good Samaritan painted in 1890. The loincloth of the man being helped by the Samaritan is red, not white and pink. The Samaritan’s head is covered with a white head cloth, and the intricate folds of his white robes recall the Parthenon sculptures and Michelangelo’s sibyls. Note too, that both men’s feet are bare in this version. Even the sky is rendered differently. In this version, the sky has a blue-grey and yellow foreboding colour, whereas it is the colour of marble in the 1850 version. We can also see more of the body of the traveller being assisted by the Samaritan. He is more emaciated and vulnerable, and we cannot make out his features as he leans his head on the Samaritan’s shoulder. The landscape is more similar to a later painting by Watts: The Prodigal Son (COMWG.192, 1872-1873), which suggests that Watts worked on this version of the Good Samaritan around the same time. Both parables appear in the Gospel of Luke. The loincloth even has a similar colour to that of the prodigal son. According to Mary Watts’s catalogue the picture was designed in 1849-50, but worked ‘upon from time to time, until 1904, when the artist decided that he would touch it no more. The canvas was framed and hung in the then newly built gallery by his direction’ [1]. It had never been exhibited before then. This particular version, recalls the much earlier work of the Venetian painter Jacopo Bassano (c. 1535-1592) The Good Samaritan (c. 1562-63), which was purchased for the National Gallery in 1856.

In 1904, in an article on pictures of the parables by for example the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais and W. M. Craig among others, Watts’s Samaritan of 1850 was considered by the art critic Arthur Fish as ‘the noblest of the modern representations of the subject’ [2]. Arthur Fish predicted that Watts’s ‘wonderful sermons in paint—for he is as great a preacher as painter—which he has bestowed so generously upon the nation will take rank among the greatest pictures of all ages’ [3].

Watts painted at least three versions of the Good Samaritan. In addition to this painting and the 1850 version, he painted a horizontal version in which the Samaritan is dressed in red, as in Eugène Delacroix’s Samaritans from 1849 and 1852 (V&A), and kneels to help the wounded traveller who lies prostrate on the ground (COMWG2010.1.156). A similar scene can be found in the woodcut by Watts’s contemporary John Everett Millais for the Dalziel Brothers (Tate).

Footnotes:

[1]  Mary Watts, Catalogue of Subject Pictures, p. 65.

[2]  Arthur Fish, ‘Pictures of the Parables’ in The Quiver 985 (Jan 1903), pp. 375-379, p. 379.

[3] Ibid., p. 379.

Text by Dr Eva-Charlotta Mebius