The Good Samaritan
Gustave Moreau (French, 1826–1898)
c. 1865–70
- Medium
- watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 21 x 29.4 cm (8 1/4 x 11 9/16 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Drawings
- Credit line
- Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Gustave Moreau was distinctive within Symbolism—a movement focused on imagination and interiority—for the fact that he realized relatively traditional subjects often drawn from mythology and religion. Here, Moreau depicts a scene from the Good Samaritan, a story from the Bible’s New Testament about a wounded traveler who is helped by a passerby, despite the ideological and religious differences between the two. Moreau presents the narrative’s most poignant moment, showing the Samaritan giving up his own horse to help his fellow man. The artist used dense, jewellike layers of watercolor to give the scene an emotional and otherworldly tone.
