Landscape with the Good Samaritan

Rembrandt painted Landscape with the Good Samaritan in 1638, one of his few pure landscape paintings and an unusual combination of landscape and biblical narrative that places the parable's moral action within an expansive Dutch countryside. The Good Samaritan — the traveler who stopped to help the robbery victim while a priest and Levite passed by — was a subject with strong humanitarian resonance in Dutch Protestant culture, where it was understood as a practical as well as theological teaching. Rembrandt sets the scene in a sweeping landscape of sky and open terrain that recalls the atmospheric landscapes of Hercules Segers, whose work Rembrandt collected and who was a significant influence on his approach to landscape. The Princes Czartoryski Museum in Krakow holds the canvas as part of the Polish aristocratic collections that accumulated significant Dutch and Flemish works from the seventeenth century onward, including Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine.

The dramatic sky with its turbulent clouds dominates the composition, while the warm light falling on the small foreground group creates an intimate focus within the vast, brooding landscape.