Samson

Painting height: 55.9 cm
Painting width: 25.4 cm

A male figure, Samson from the Biblical Book of Judges, is seated in a timeless hilly landscape. One of his victims lies dead at his feet. Watts has captured the moment after the slaughter of the thousand Philistines (Judges 15:19). The jawbone of an ass, which he used to destroy the Philistines has fallen from the exhausted Samson’s hand and rests in the left corner.

As Watts depicted Jael (COMWG.368, 1862-1863) in the moment after the killing of Sisera, so too do we find the figure of Samson slumped on a rock, exhausted after the ferocious struggle with a thousand Philistines. Given their similar size (the ‘Jael’ measures 55.9x28.6 cm), it is possible that he thought of them as a pair. They were also illustrations of events related in the same book of the Old Testament, the Book of Judges. To Samson’s right lies the weapon, the jawbone of an ass, that has fallen from his hand. To his left, lies the dead body of one of his victims, and we can see the foot of another that rests on the back of the slain Philistine. As a reviewer in the Spectator noted it is the ‘only trace of the battle’ [1]. The reviewer went on to critique the realistic interpretation of the subject matter and the ‘too refined’ expression of Watts’s Samson, but noted that it was ‘quite the best piece of colour in the exhibition. The warm brown flesh, the red garment, the sunlit green slope, and the dark-blue mountains are most harmonious, and the whole, though very subdued in tone, is warm and glowing’ [2].

The story of Samson the Nazirite is told in the Book of Judges, chapters 13-16 when the Israelites live under the dominion of the Philistines. His mother was barren, but the Lord appeared to her and said that she would give birth to a son who would follow the vow of a Nazirite explained in the Book of Numbers 6:1-21, abstaining from wine, not cut his hair, and avoid coming into contact with dead bodies. In return, he would be given superhuman strength. For example, Samson is able to kill a lion with his bare hands. Samson falls in love with a Philistine woman and ignores the entreaties of his parents to choose a woman of his own people. At their wedding, Samson tells a riddle based on the killing of the lion. The failure of the Philistine wedding guests to solve the riddle enrages them. So, they threaten and convince Samson’s wife to trick her husband into telling her the answer to the riddle. The conflict escalates and eventually leads to Samson slaughtering a thousand Philistines (Judges 15:15).

This was not the first time that Watts had depicted the tragic hero Samson as Julia Dudkiewicz and Carol Willoughby has recently shown in their article on the Meeting of Samson and Delilah (c. 1847-56), which is particularly reminiscent of the work of Michelangelo and now in the collection at Aldourie Castle, the childhood home of Mary Watts [3]. In the earlier monumental version, Watts imagined Samson and Delilah meeting after she caused his hair to be cut, whereby he lost his strength and was blinded by the Philistines.

Samson was a figure that Watts identified with in regard to his failed plan for a series of paintings that were meant to tell the ‘great epic of life’ that he had to give up around the same time as he painted Samson and his paintings of Cain, his House of Life fresco scheme. In a note, which Mary Watts speculated had been intended only for himself, he wrote of how he felt ‘as some athletic man who, awaking from a fever, finds himself reduced to half the strength of infancy; as Samson might have felt, when shaking of his lethargy, and shorn of his locks feels the wonderment of strangeness, the despair of weakness’ [4].

Footnotes:

[1]    Anon. ‘Cabinet Pictures in Oil at the Dudley Gallery’ in the Spectator (Nov 4, 1876), pp. 1376-1377, p. 1376.

[2] Ibid., p. 1376.

[3] Julia Dudkiewicz and Carol Willoughby, ‘A Long-Lost Painting by GF Watts Rediscovered and Identified’ in The British Art Journal 11.1 (2010), pp. 99-107.

[4] G. F. Watts quoted in Mary S. Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life Vol I (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), p. 263.

Text by Dr Eva-Charlotta Mebius