Le bon Samaritain (The good Samaritan)

Rodolphe Bresdin, artist

1822–1885

Le bon Samaritain (The good Samaritan), 1861

Where object was made: France

Material/technique: chine collé; wove paper; lithograph

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 560 x 440 mm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 22 1/16 x 17 5/16 in
Frame Dimensions (Height x Width x Depth): 32 3/4 x 24 3/4 x 1 1/2 in
Weight (Weight): 15 lbs

Credit line: Museum purchase: Helen Foresman Spencer Art Acquisition Fund

Accession number: 2011.0011

Not on display

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The title of this lithograph originally referenced a renowned Emir of Algeria, Abdel el-Kader (Abd el-Kader, 1808–1883), who intervened to save a Christian community in Damascus, Syria, in 1860, the year before this monumental lithograph was completed. The fact that Bresdin changed the title to the more widely known biblical narrative of the Good Samaritan suggests that the title was secondary to the artist’s vision of an imagined world overrun by plant life and the multitude of creatures it supports. The novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans praised this specific print, and notably its botanical content, in the text of his 1884 À rebours (Against the Grain), describing the picture as:

…a wild entanglement of palms, service trees, oaks, growing all together in defiance of seasons and climates, an outburst of virgin forest, crammed with apes, owls and screech owls, cumbered with old stumps shapeless as roots of coral, a magic wood, pierced by a clearing dimly revealing far away, beyond a camel and the group of the Samaritan and the man who fell by the wayside, a river and behind it again a fairy-like city climbing to the horizon line, rising to meet a strange-looking sky, dotted with birds, woolly with rolling clouds, swelling as it were, with bales of vapour. You would have thought it the work of an early Italian master or a half-developed Albert Dürer [sic], composed under the influence of opium.