Christ and the Samaritan woman.

This 1909 religious canvas, held at the Museum of the Warsaw Archdiocese, depicts the encounter between Christ and the Samaritan woman at Jacob's Well — a subject Malczewski treated repeatedly across his career, returning to it with varying emphases. The institutional home — the Warsaw Archdiocese Museum — indicates that this version was specifically created for or acquired by the Catholic Church, and Malczewski likely emphasised the devotional and theological dimensions of the encounter over the allegorical and nationalistic readings that characterised his more secular treatments of the same subject. The gospel account (John 4:1–42) presents the conversation as one of the New Testament's longest single exchanges between Christ and an individual, encompassing questions of living water, true worship, and messianic identity. By 1909 Malczewski was at the height of his powers and could bring the full range of his technical and symbolic vocabulary to a religious commission while meeting the devotional expectations of an ecclesiastical patron.

Religious commissions for ecclesiastical collections demanded a more conventional compositional approach than Malczewski's independent Symbolist works, and this canvas likely deploys a clearer narrative staging of the well encounter with less allegorical distortion. The figures of Christ and the woman are carefully composed to convey the theological centrality of their exchange, with traditional iconographic cues — Christ's robe colours, the woman's vessel — providing legibility for a devotional audience.