The Good Samaritan

The Good Samaritan, painted in 1846 in oil on canvas and held at Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, takes its subject from the parable in the Gospel of Luke, in which a traveller beaten and left by the roadside is passed by a priest and a Levite before being helped by a Samaritan — a member of a group despised by his contemporaries. Millet's treatment of this parable in 1846, two years before his decisive move to Barbizon, belongs to the period when he was still working through a range of religious, mythological, and literary subjects alongside portraiture. The parable's emphasis on practical compassion transcending social and ethnic prejudice accorded with Millet's own democratic, humanist sympathies, which would manifest differently but no less powerfully in his later paintings of labouring rural poor. Museum Wales's holding includes this early example of Millet's subject range beyond pastoral painting.

Oil on canvas with the warm, academically trained technique of Millet's pre-Barbizon period. A figurative narrative subject of this type requires careful compositional management of the two figures — the injured traveller and the Samaritan bending to assist — creating an axis of help and dependency that carries the parable's meaning.