Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well, Oil on Oak Panel, 17th Century, Panel Maker's Mark, Gilt Frame

The mountain behind the well is a thin blue glaze over a light ground, so the panel itself carries part of the distance. Everything nearer recedes from it in warm colour, and at the centre two hands answer each other across the well head, hers raised palm outward as she objects, his open toward her.

Oil on oak panel, 10 x 13 inches (25 x 33 cm), 15 x 19 inches (38 x 48 cm) framed, unsigned, seventeenth century, in a carved and gilded frame.

The subject is the fourth chapter of John. She stands at the left in red and gold with a blue sash, he is seated on the stonework at the right in red and deep green, and the well head with its rope and pulley stands between them. A dark mass of trees and ruined masonry closes the right side, while the left opens onto a river valley below a conical blue mountain. The drapery is worked in three values of red, and the blue and gold braid at her collar is set down bead by bead.

The reverse carries a panel maker's mark struck into the oak, of the kind applied by the guild panel makers who supplied prepared boards to painters in the seventeenth century. The board is a single piece, close-grained and hand planed, with three old worm holes above the mark and a batten added later across the top.

The frame is carved and water gilded, with a ribboned laurel garland on the outer moulding, a bead course, and a leaf moulding at the sight edge, worn to the bole on the arrises.

A landscape built to a formula
The dark mass on one side, the open valley on the other, the figures set at the centre in full light and a blue distance behind them, is the construction French painters learned from Poussin and used through the whole century. It was taught, copied and repeated, and it is why a scripture scene of this date looks like a landscape with two people in it rather than a devotional image.

Two old horizontal splits cross the paint layer at the level of the wall, restored and stable, with no corresponding split in the board itself, and scattered small losses with an abrasion in the ground at the lower right.