The Good Samaritan

A traveller is lifted from the roadside and set upon his donkey by the compassionate Samaritan, the scene framed against a landscape of pale archaic buildings and distant mountains. Gustave Moreau, the Symbolist master of the fabulous and the sacred, painted this watercolor in the later 1860s, during the years before the Salon made him famous with his great biblical and mythological set-pieces. Its jewel-like color, the archaic costumes and the dream-like remoteness of the setting are thoroughly characteristic of the refined, literary art in which Moreau transformed a familiar parable into an eerie, gem-encrusted vision.