Peter Paul Rubens
NG6461 
Samson’s Hair is cut as he sleeps on Delilah’s Lap at Night (‘Samson and Delilah’)

Gregory Martin, assisted by Nina Cahill, with technical contributions by Marika Spring, Catherine Higgitt, Joanna Russell, Rachel Billinge, Rachel Beard and Larry Keith, 2025

Extracted from:
Gregory Martin, Nina Cahill and Bart Cornelis, The Flemish Paintings (London: The National Gallery, forthcoming).

About 1609–11

Oil on oak panel, 184.8 x 204 cm

Inscriptions and labels, on the front: i8 in pale grey paint (an unidentified Liechtenstein inventory number, see below); on the reverse of the blockboard (see below): inscriptions and labels referring to the painting’s exhibition in Hamburg, 1946–1952 , exhibition in Antwerp in 1977, sojourn at Christie’s, London, in 1980, and arrival at the National Gallery.¹

Technical Notes²

The Support

The support is made up of seven boards identified as Baltic oak, with a horizontal grain and horizontal joins originally reinforced with dowels.³ Dendrochronological analysis of the boards indicates a plausible date for use of the panel from 1605.⁴ The panel has been thinned and glued to a piece of slightly larger modern blockboard (fig. 1).⁵ There is a narrow margin of unpainted wood at the sides of the oak panel (see fig. 7), which probably results from the support being held firm by grooved battens while the ground and then paint were applied;⁶ the ground and paint extend to the top and bottom edges.

The Ground and Priming

The ground is of white chalk,⁷ probably bound with glue. On top is a very thin yellow‐brown priming made up of a dull yellow earth pigment mixed with a small amount of lead white and a little bone or ivory black,⁸ streakily applied diagonally from top right to bottom left and vertically at the edges, perhaps with a broad soft‐bristled brush (fig. 2).⁹ Such a yellow‐brown or greyish priming was commonly used and similarly applied in paintings by Rubens.¹⁰ As was often the case, Rubens was happy for the priming to be left visible, showing up light along contours or between brushstrokes, for instance in Delilah’s white drapery (fig. 3).

Materials and Technique

The composition is likely to have been laid out using mainly golden‐brown and darker brown paint containing yellow earth and umber, with occasional almost black strokes, as was Rubens’s usual practice.¹¹ Having done this, he made only a few minor revisions (pentimenti) during painting, as seen by infrared reflectography, macro XRF scanning and X‐radiography (figs 4, 5 and 6). Delilah’s breasts were adjusted several times to make them slightly smaller, the contour of her neck and back was moved slightly further out, an additional fold was added to the base of her sleeve and small changes were made to her left hand and foot. The back of the old woman’s head‐covering was also reduced and a finial of an equine head at the far end of the bed was suppressed (figs 7, 8 and 9).

For the yellow‐brown shadows of the skin, for example on Samson’s bare back and calf, and on Delilah’s right hand, a rather transparent yellow earth was used, with thinly applied umber for the darkest details. Lighter areas are painted with an opaque mixture of lead white with red lake and a little earth pigment, vermilion and azurite, this last in greater proportion in the bluish or greenish half shadows.¹² The more strongly pink areas contain more vermilion. Thick lead‐tin yellow highlights on the fingertips of the old woman and the collarbone of the man cutting Samson’s hair evoke the glow from the candlelight where it is reflected (fig. 10). The thickest impasto in the painting is the flame of the candle and the wax dripping from it, also painted with lead‐tin yellow (fig. 11).

The same transparent yellow earth was the main component of the paint used to render the midtones of the folds of the satin lining of Delilah’s ample shawl, where it was mixed with a little red lake, lead‐tin yellow, vermilion and perhaps some yellow lake.¹³ For the lighter areas a more opaque yellow was used, with the highlights painted with a broad brush loaded with pure lead‐tin yellow.¹⁴ The deepest shadows were made with transparent paint rich in red lake mixed with some umber.

The red lake is probably the same as that in the rich red of Delilah’s crimson dress, where analysis confirmed that the dyestuff it contains derives from the cochineal insect.¹⁵ This red lake was used almost alone for the deepest shadows of the folds, or mixed with varying proportions of vermilion, lead white or black for their midtones and highlights, which in some areas have then been glazed with red lake, or emphasised with more orange‐red strokes rich in vermilion. The sheen of satin is conveyed by the contrast between smoothly rendered deeper shadows and the thick impasto of the intricate creases.

The red lake pigment was again a major component of the rich purple of the retracted curtain;¹⁶ no blue pigment was in the mixture, only varying quantities of charcoal black and lead white. The same combination but with less red lake was used for the cooler blue garment of the young man.

The dull greyish‐green paint of the old woman’s costume is a mixture of lead white, charcoal black, a little lead‐tin yellow, and what seems to be yellow lake in addition. Macro XRF scanning indicates that the shadows contain a copper pigment, probably verdigris, so the now brown paint is likely to have darkened to some extent, although it was never a bright green since it also contains some black and a little umber (figs 12 and 13).¹⁷

The same pigments and combination of pigments found elsewhere in the painting were used for the freely painted carpet. The grey‐green parts are a mixture of azurite, lead white, yellow earth, lead‐tin yellow and probably yellow lake.¹⁸ The dark grey‐blues contain azurite mixed with black. Vermilion was used for the brightest reds, red earth for the duller tones and red lake for the dark areas.

The wall of the room is rendered almost entirely with a translucent reddish‐brown paint containing umber, with only small amounts of other pigments in certain areas.¹⁹ Vermilion and probably some red lake were used to model the ewer. The dull blue‐grey of the night sky contains a copper pigment, presumably azurite, together with carbon black; a similar mixture also rendered parts of the armour.²⁰

The binding medium was probably linseed oil throughout.²¹

Conservation History

When the painting was acquired by the National Gallery, the painting had already undergone a major structural intervention. In 1930, soon after its purchase by August Neuerburg (see below), Ludwig Burchard, already a leading expert on Rubens, described ‘the reverse of the panel [as] still in its original state’; but it was evidently soon decided to follow what was then considered a desirable conservation procedure and have the support thinned and then adhered to laminated blockboard.²²

The painting was cleaned and restored by David Bomford in 1982.²³

Present Condition

It was noted in 1982 that there had been a number of splits along the wood grain of the panel, running in from the left and right edges and dating from before it was attached to the blockboard, the most significant of which crosses the entire width of the panel near the top edge.²⁴ Notwithstanding the drastic nature of the earlier structural intervention, the thinned panel has remained securely stuck to its secondary support and has required no further intervention.

The paint layers are in excellent condition; there are a few scattered small losses associated with old joins and splits, slight wearing in parts of the thinly painted background and fine drying cracks in a few areas near the bottom of the painting. There are no discreet losses of significant size apart from a small round disruption of the paint in the lower left, which probably results from the removal of a seal or label (figs 14 and 15, see below).

Select Bibliography

Fanti 1767, p. 77, no. 391; Smith 1829–42, vol. 2, p. 291, no. 1009; Evers 1944, pp. 151–66, figs. 54, 64–5; Kahr 1972, pp. 292, 296, fig. 20; Buddensieg 1977, pp. 328–45, fig. 1; Brown 1983, passim and fig. 5; Plesters 1983, pp. 30–49, figs 1, 2, 3, 10, 11, 14, 18; Jaffé 1989, no. 90, pp. 165–6, illus. p. 165; D’Hulst and Vandenven 1989, pp. 107–13, no. 31, fig. 72; Jaffé 2000, pp. 21–5, figs 1, 5, 7; De Staelen 2004, pp. 467–9, fig. 39; Sutton and Wieseman 2004, pp. 91, 92 under no. 88, fig. 1; Logan and Plomp 2005, pp. 124–7 under no. 28, fig. 69; Jaffé et al. 2005, p. 116 under no. 47, p. 160 under nos 72–6, p. 165 under no. 78, p. 167, illus. pp. 164 (detail), 167 (detail), 168; Jaffé et al. 2007, pp. 11–17, 36, 44, 52, 57, 62, 65, figs 1, 4, 5, 6 (details); Georgievska‐Shine 2007, pp. 460–73, fig. 1; Jaffé 2009, pp. 10, 43, 54, 55, 60, 65–6, 69, 71, 81, 94–5, 99, 115, 138, figs 45, 47; Meier 2014, p. 242; Nickel 2019, pp. 32–3, fig. 8; Logan and Belkin 2021–, vol. II, pp. 102–4 under no. 248.

Exhibitions

Antwerp 1977 (20); London 1983 (not numbered); London 1986 (15); London 2005 (77); Antwerp and Vienna 2007 (1).

Introduction

Acquired by the National Gallery in 1980 after a long period in obscurity, Rubens’s Samson and Delilah is rightly admired as a masterpiece of the artist’s early maturity. A certain notoriety attaches to this celebrated work, as its authenticity has had its naysayers; furthermore, the full sequence of its ownership remains unknown. However, criticism of its status is mistaken, and its incomplete provenance is not of serious consequence when weighed against the work’s aesthetic merit. Indeed, Samson and Delilah’s place among the artist’s most beautiful and empathetic subject paintings remains undisturbed.

Provenance

Not exceptionally, there are gaps in the chain of ownership in the course of which both the status and attribution of Samson and Delilah were discussed or altered. But the greatest deficiency is that the painting’s whereabouts following its despatch to Paris in 1881 and its discovery there almost fifty years later are not known.

Antwerp

The first owner of the picture – who may well have commissioned it, as it was in his possession soon after it must have been painted (see further below) – was a prominent and cultivated Antwerp patrician, Nicolaas Rockox (1560–1640), who held leading positions in the governance of the city.²⁵

Reflecting perhaps the esteem in which it was held by Rockox is the fact that it was prominently listed in his estate inventory of 19–20 December 1640 (begun a week after his death) listing the contents of his house, Den Gulden Rinck, in the Keizerstraat, Antwerp. The painting is described as hanging in the main reception room: ‘groote Saleth: Eene schilderye oliverwe op panneel in zyne lyste beteekenende Sampson ende Dalida van d’maecxsel van den heere Rubens’ (‘In the great salon: A painting oil on panel in its frame showing Samson and Delilah made by the master Rubens’).²⁶ Not specified is its position in the gilt‐leather‐lined room; its size would suggest that it was the chimney piece or showpiece (schouwstuck) and its listing first in the sequence would indicate as much. Indeed, it is so displayed in the capriccio view of the ‘groote Saleth’ painted by Frans Francken II (1581–1642) some five years earlier (Munich, Alte Pinakothek), which itself was a work that Rockox may have owned (fig. 16).²⁷

Rockox died without direct heirs. His marriage to Adriana Perez (1568–1619) – the daughter of a prominent wealthy Antwerp merchant of Spanish Marranos descent and a Fleming of noble lineage²⁸ – was childless and he had been a widower of some twenty years when he died. He left his immovable property to a nephew and his other possessions to the city almoners with whom he had long been associated.²⁹ These legatees entrusted their bequest with the relief auctioneer Peter van Fraeyenborch at the traditional Friday Market (Vrijdagse Markt), who offered its contents for sale on 6 June (and following days) 1641.³⁰ Few auction catalogues of the seventeenth century have survived and that for Rockox’s collection is no exception; all that is known about the sale is that the proceeds totalled 12,302 guilders 1½ stuivers, as recorded in the Rockox estate papers.³¹

The names of the buyers at the sale are not known, and our knowledge of the painting’s whereabouts for some further decades is not certain. But it came into the possession of a branch of the Moretus (Moerentorf) family, known to Rockox as the part owners of the prestigious publishing house, the Officina Plantiniana, whose premises were on the Vrijdagsmarkt. Unfortunately, only generalised descriptions are given for many of the paintings listed in the family’s successive estate inventories, namely that of Maria Moretus, née de Sweerdt (1588–1655),³² the widow of Jan II Moretus (1576–1618), who for a time followed her late husband in being an active partner in the publishing house and subsequently continued to receive a substantial share in the firm’s profits,³³ and that of her daughter Elizabeth (Isabella) Hugens (1617–1678).³⁴ It was the latter’s son‐in‐law, the councillor Joannes Baptista Segers, whom the Antwerp dealer based in Vienna, Marcus Forchondt (1651–1706), named as the owner of the Samson and Delilah in a letter of 3 September 1698.³⁵ Forchondt was well informed, for at the time he left Antwerp in 1667 the painting was still in the possession of Segers’s mother‐in‐law, probably in the same house on the Meir; Segers’s wife – Johanna Catharina (1649–1719) – was her mother’s sole legatee.

As already indicated, Maria Moretus was a woman of substance, leaving nearly 70,000 guilders to her son and some 40,000 guilders to each of her two daughters;³⁶ the estate inventory of her possessions in her town house, Sint Marcus in the Kerkhofstraat, was seemingly drawn up by them and not by an expert. Some seventy paintings are listed but well over half the entries refer simply to paintings, with no details given. That she was the owner of the Samson and Delilah, having bought it at the Rockox sale, as has been claimed,³⁷ is an appealing conjecture which in our present state of knowledge cannot be verified.

Five paintings can be seen to recur in the estate inventories of Rockox and/or of Maria and her daughter Elizabeth; these could be five of the lots that Maria may have bought at the auction (of which two unspecified in her estate inventory were left to one or other of her legatees).³⁸ But the correspondences cannot be regarded as certain as the descriptions are not sufficiently specific. Also listed in Maria’s estate inventory is the painting of Samson after Rubens (‘schilderye van Samsom nae Rubens’) listed in the middle room above the great room (‘middelcamer boven de groote camer’). The designation of it as a copy is, or would be, fatal to its identification as the National Gallery painting unless it is explained as a simple mistake based on the family’s belief that another version in Antwerp later recognised as a copy was autograph.³⁹ This would also explain why it was not displayed in one of the reception rooms. Also to be taken into account is the fact that no mention is made of its purchase in the Moretus housekeeping accounts of 1629–55 (although the ledger for Maria’s personal expenditure only begins on the last day of June 1641).⁴⁰

However, reasonably certain is her daughter Elizabeth’s ownership of the painting (if not by inheritance then through purchase or via her husband), as it is listed with the subject unspecified but along with another painting (by Van Dyck) also of later interest to Forchondt. It appears in the estate inventory of her sumptuously decorated house on the Meir, left to her daughter Johanna Catherina in 1678, as the chimney piece or showpiece by Rubens (‘schoustuck van Rubens’) in the great salon (‘groote sâlette’).⁴¹

In the autumn of 1698 an approach would have been made to councillor Segers by Guilliam Forchondt on behalf of his brother Marcus with a view to a sale to Johann Adam Andreas I, Prince of Liechtenstein (1662–1712, reigned from 1684),⁴² a great Maecenas and avid collector of the work of Rubens and Van Dyck.⁴³ On 5 June 1699, almost ten months to the day after Marcus’s first letter of enquiry, Guilliam drew up an invoice for two paintings bought by Marcus and sent to Vienna: ‘Samson en Dalida van Rubens’ at £299 and the portrait by Van Dyck at £155 1s.;⁴⁴ also itemised were the costs of cleaning and reframing, and of the carriage to Vienna via Cologne.⁴⁵ The paintings had been bought at the Forchondts’ own risk, the prince having made conditions that the Rubens was not a copy and was not executed in the artist’s first manner but after his return from Italy; its high price was already the subject of his complaint.⁴⁶

Vienna

Samson and Delilah arrived in Vienna in the first half of June 1699, but the sale to the prince was not straightforward.⁴⁷ Marcus Forchondt’s concerns about its authenticity were soon dispelled;⁴⁸ but the prince’s offer of Rexd. (Rijksdaalder/Reichsthaler) 1,333, made in early September for Samson and Delilah and the Van Dyck portrait, was rejected as too low. Negotiations over the price, in which different currencies – Rijksdaalder, guilders, pounds sterling and pattacoons – were brought into Forchondt’s calculations, were protracted, and Forchondt’s position was not eased by his receiving a counter‐offer from the prince’s near neighbour in Vienna, Count Ferdinand Ernst von Mollard (1648–1716), as the count already had a long‐outstanding debt with him.⁴⁹ A settlement with Johann Adam Andreas I was only likely reached in the following March when he increased his offer by Rexd. 200.30.⁵⁰

The paintings were to join the prince’s ever‐growing collection destined to hang on the second floor of his new Viennese palace, the Stadtpalais, then under construction on the Bankgasse. The decision to display Samson and Delilah there, perhaps with a pendant of Hercules and Iole (Omphale), was taken by 1706, as indicated by a 22 November invoice of that year for works by the sculptor Giovanni Giuliani (1664–1744): ‘Doi altre cartelle, lunghe doi piedi onzze nove et larghe ventidue onzze, uno ove e dipinto l’Ercole et Iole, et l’altra ove e il Samsone con Dalila, à fiorini otto l’una …’ (‘Two other cartouches, two feet nine inches long and twenty‐two inches wide, one where the Hercules and Iole is painted, and the other where is Samson with Dalila, eight florins each …’).⁵¹ The first painting can perhaps be identified as that by Carlo Cignani (1628–1719) on the London market in 2012.⁵² At this point the collection may have been displayed not by school but possibly by subject matter, so it may be that Rubens’s Samson and Delilah and Cignani’s Hercules and Iole were hung as pendants.⁵³ That this would have been a happy arrangement is attested by their similar themes and balancing compositions (although the Rubens is some 40 cm taller).⁵⁴

Johann Adam Andreas I died in 1712 without direct male heirs, but he did not leave his paintings and works of art to the inheritor of his noble titles.⁵⁵ These were only reunited in 1722 after a lengthy lawsuit which determined that the paintings and works of art he had entailed – Samson and Delilah was included in a list of such paintings, bequeathed to his nephew Emanuel (1700–1771)⁵⁶ – should pass to the next prince’s (Anton Florian I, 1656–1721) successor to the title, Josef Johann Adam I (1690–1732).⁵⁷ In 1733, during the minority of the latter’s successor Johann Nepomuk Karl I (1724–1748), his guardian and uncle, Josef Wenzel I (1696–1772), ordered that the entailed paintings (the so‐called Majorats‐Galerie) should be stamped back and front with the black and/or red Liechtenstein seal.⁵⁸ There are two possible explanations for seals not being present on Samson and Delilah:⁵⁹ either the operation was never completed and the painting was one of those left out, or the seals have been removed; indeed the paint losses in a circular area in the bottom left corner, which have been retouched but are visible in the technical images, could result from the removal of the seal (see figs 14 and 15),⁶⁰ while a seal on the reverse of the support would have been lost when the panel was thinned (see Technical Notes).

The same Josef Wenzel I, himself prince of Liechtenstein from 1748, commissioned the first catalogue of the works of art in the Majorats‐Galerie from Vincenzo Fanti (1719–1776), the director of the collection from 1759. It was published in 1767 and saw the attribution of the Samson and Delilah to Rubens’s pupil Jan van den Hoecke (1611–1651)⁶¹ who as court painter to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (1614–1662) spent several years in Vienna and was held in some esteem during the eighteenth century.⁶² Another of Fanti’s reattributions was Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents, which he ascribed to Frans de Neve (1606–1681).⁶³ Such misunderstanding of Rubens’s first mature style followed the Abbé Dubois de Saint Gelais’s attribution of Rubens’s Hercules and Omphale (Paris, Musée du Louvre), then in the Orléans collection, to Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert (1613/14–1654).⁶⁴ Later in the century, and perhaps following this trend, Rubens’s Tarquin and Lucretia (private collection, formerly Schloss Sanssouci, Bildergalerie, Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin‐Brandenburg and recently on display in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg) was attributed to Abraham van Diepenbeeck (1596–1675).⁶⁵

After 1807, during the reign of Prince Johann I (1760–1836), Samson and Delilah was transferred to the Liechtenstein Garden Palace in Rossau, then a suburb of Vienna. It was shown in the first hanging plan by the gallery director Joseph Anton Bauer (1756–1831)⁶⁶ on the same wall as Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents, which by then had also been attributed to Jan van den Hoecke, and both paintings were valued for an identical sum.⁶⁷

The princely collection was reformed by Prince Johann’s grandson, Johann II (1840–1929); its director, the distinguished art historian Jacob von Falke (1825–1897), was appointed in 1858, the year of his accession. The prince was to be a keen art collector.⁶⁸ But the size of the collection, comprising 1,648 items, was deemed to inhibit its proper display in the Garden Palace, and a policy of deaccessioning saw the total reduced by 200 in 1873. During the following twelve years a further 600 works were removed,⁶⁹ among them the Samson and Delilah, despatched to Paris in 1881.⁷⁰ Unlike many of the other paintings then deaccessioned, Samson and Delilah was not offered at the Hôtel Drouot,⁷¹ and what happened to it has yet to be clarified. The painting had left the collection as by Jan van den Hoecke; five years later the first volume of Max Rooses’s Rubens oeuvre catalogue, covering Old Testament subjects, was published, in which a print by Jacob Matham (1571–1631) was reproduced as recording the composition of an unknown painting (‘Tableau inconnu’).⁷² Whether that would have caused a reassessment of the painting in Vienna is but a counterfactual; it is an ironic coincidence that the Samson and Delilah should have been discovered in the year that Johann II died.

Paris, Hamburg, London

After its despatch to Paris in 1881, the Samson and Delilah, masquerading as the work of Jan van den Hoecke, disappeared from view in circumstances that remain to be explained. Its then whereabouts are still unknown, yet most likely the painting stayed in Paris, for it was found and recognised there in 1929 at the premises of the restorer Gaston Levy (died 1957) by the art dealer Kurt Benedict (active in Berlin 1923–35, then in Paris 1935–60).⁷³ It was sold by Benedict on 22 January 1930 to August Neuerburg (1884–1944), Elbchaussee 77, Blankenese, Hamburg, for 80,000 Reichsmark.⁷⁴ Ludwig Burchard (1886–1960) made known the discovery in a footnote in a volume of essays commemorative of Gustav Glück, the recently retired director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, published in Vienna in 1933.⁷⁵

August Neuerburg belonged to a dynasty of tobacco merchants; his wealth was made from the manufacture of cigarettes, having founded the Zigarettenfabrik Haus Neuerburg with his brother in 1908; factories were to be set up in several German cities, including Hamburg in 1926.⁷⁶ He seems to have bought his old masters between 1927 and 1930, specialising in seventeenth‐century Netherlandish art. The collection comprised at least eleven paintings attributed to Rubens, making it possibly the largest group of works by the artist in private hands in Germany.⁷⁷ Burchard provided insurance valuations, and Neuerburg’s relationship with him was warmly personal, extending by letter after the former’s departure from Germany in 1935.⁷⁸

During the Second World War the Samson and Delilah was with other paintings from the collection consigned to the cultural administration in Hamburg for safekeeping. From 21 March 1940 it was stored at the Kämmerei building (financial department), Gänsemarkt, Hamburg,⁷⁹ and transferred to the Flakturm IV bunker on Heiligengeistfeld on 17 January 1945.⁸⁰ In July of the following year the painting was moved to the Hamburger Kunsthalle,⁸¹ where it remained on loan until 23 May 1952, when it was returned to August Neuerburg’s heirs, his children Gottfried (1921–1989) and Margret (died 1986), who married Heinz Köser (a herring wholesale magnate), with whom the painting was to be housed at Joachimstrasse 5, Hamburg.⁸²

After the 1977 exhibition in Antwerp (see below), Mrs Köser privately expressed the wish that the painting might return to Antwerp, possibly to the Rockoxhuis (owned by the Kredietbank), and offered first refusal in the case of sale to Frans Baudouin, the director of the Antwerp Kunsthistorische Musea (the then grouping of Antwerp museums centred on the Rubenshuis).⁸³ Following the family’s decision to sell, Samson and Delilah was moved early in March 1980 from Hamburg to Antwerp where it was stored at the Kredietbank;⁸⁴ however, an offer by the Kredietbank of around 3 million Deutschmark (then approximately £725,000) was turned down by the Neuerburg family.⁸⁵ It opted for an auction sale at Christie’s, London, on 11 July 1980, where the painting was purchased as lot 134 for £2.3 million (excluding premium) by the London dealers Thomas Agnew and Sons acting on behalf of the National Gallery.⁸⁶

Textual Source

The life story of Samson, a Judge of the Israelites, is told in the book of Judges 13: 24–16: 31 and would have been well known to Rubens. Depicted in the National Gallery painting is the prelude to the hero’s capture by the enemy Philistines over whom he had long held sway. He has finally revealed to Delilah, the last of his lovers, who was in the pay of the Philistines, that the source of his superhuman, all‐conquering physical strength lay in his unshaven head of hair. Delilah, having alerted the Philistines and caused Samson to ‘sleep upon her knees’, summoned a man to cut his locks (Judges 16: 19). Thus enfeebled, Samson was captured by the Philistines.

A Commission?

Of all the schouwstucken (chimney pieces) executed at the beginning of Rubens’s mature activity in Antwerp, the Samson and Delilah is exceptional for its early, private owner – Nicolaas Rockox – being known (see Provenance). Most of these masterpieces were likely not bespoke but painted speculatively, at least initially, the early history of the Juno and Argus (Cologne, Wallraf‐Richartz Museum & Fondation Corboud) being a case in point.⁸⁷ Although the Rockox estate inventory did not describe the painting as a schouwstuck, the capriccio view of the great reception room (‘groote Saleth’) by Frans Francken II (see Provenance) shows it hanging above the fireplace (as it was in the 2007 exhibition in the Rockoxhuis), and for this reason and for unconvincing evidence about the low viewpoint and the source of light,⁸⁸ it has been stated without any documentary support that the painting was a commission from Rockox (fig. 16).⁸⁹ However, the work could have been acquired simply because it was liked and because it would fit above the fireplace in the main reception room of his house. But granted the number of extant preparatory works (see below), apparently also exceptional for a work destined for private ownership, the situation may not have been as clear cut; we can speculate that the subject early interested Rockox and that the modelli were executed while discussions with the artist proceeded, with the drawing and final modello conveying the required proportions being executed once Rubens had been given the ‘go‐ahead’ (see below).

Composition

The reputation of the Venetian Jacopo Tintoretto (about 1518–1594) – only recently dead when Rubens arrived in Italy – would have been well known to him. He is likely to have become familiar with Tintoretto’s Samson and Delilah (Sarasota, John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art; for clarity reproduced is the better‐preserved version by Domenico Tintoretto, fig. 17),⁹⁰ as the connection with the grouping of the four protagonists is so close. The Tintoretto, it is suggested, served only as Rubens’s point of departure as he planned fundamentally to change the role assigned to Delilah, probably having in mind The Capture of Samson, the woodcut by Nicolò Boldrini (1510–1570) after Titian⁹¹ that introduced a greater sense of drama to the event. The key decision was not to portray the violence of capture but the still tension of the action that led to it. To depict Delilah’s confident composure, Rubens may have recalled the pose of the figure of Night for the tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici in Florence by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564)⁹² or his design for Leda in the lost Leda and the Swan,⁹³ after both of which Rubens made copies.⁹⁴ In a print of 1589 by Raphael Sadeler I (1560/1–1628 or 1632) after Joos van Winghe (1544–1603) the hero’s hair is cut with a delicately held pair of scissors seen in profile,⁹⁵ and to provide a tense focal point to the composition Rubens may well have borrowed from it and switched the arrangement of hands so as to be seen frontally (figs 18 and 19). A source for the extraordinary positioning of Samson, lying curled up recumbent against Delilah’s legs with the face turned outwards, has not been identified; it may have been entirely the artist’s invention – it being a modification of the pose of the foremost naked porter in the Adoration of the Magi of 1609 (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado)⁹⁶ – and so devised to permit the depiction of the hero’s massive body without overwhelming the composition. But in the motif of the head resting on the hand, a reference to Michelangelo was specific. Rubens made a copy of the right‐hand section of the Abiah lunette in the Sistine ceiling, in which, crucially, he turned the head outwards, although it has been suggested that this copy (on a sheet in the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett) was a few years later than the likely date of execution of the Samson painting (see below).⁹⁷ The artist’s copies after the antique Torso Belvedere (Vatican, Musei Vaticani) (fig. 20) and Farnese Hercules (Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli)⁹⁸ most likely inspired the rendering of the Jewish hero’s muscled back and arm, his articulation of which was assisted by related life studies for the Prado Adoration of the Magi of 1609 (see below). In depicting the soles of Samson’s feet, Rubens showed his appreciation of the daring departure from convention that Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573–1610) made in the display of bare feet in, for instance, the Madonna of the Rosary (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum).⁹⁹ For the more prominent and significant motif of the old woman holding the candle forward to project its light Rubens adapted the central motif of the Mocking of Ceres by his friend Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610),¹⁰⁰ and anticipated the fashion for the Caravaggesque night‐piece in the Netherlands (fig. 21).¹⁰¹

Setting

Rubens, under the influence of Elsheimer,¹⁰² whose work he had recently admired in Rome, departed from recent convention in setting the scene in the confined space of a simple bedchamber. Tradition had placed the protagonists in a landscape or in an open palatial ambience; exceptionally, a design by Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) engraved by Cornelis Galle I (1576–1650) had depicted a bed set in a spacious columned building.¹⁰³ Although Rubens had earlier made copies after German prints,¹⁰⁴ whether he was aware of prints of the subject in which the setting is a bedroom or bourgeois interior by less well‐known artists such as Anton von Woensam (about 1493–6–about 1541) of 1529¹⁰⁵ and Hans Brosamer (about 1500–1552/4) of 1545¹⁰⁶ respectively must remain an open question. Brosamer’s interior can be assumed to have been a bedchamber because of the objects that furnished it, among which are glass flasks and a ewer and basin. The former also appear against the wall on a ledge in Rubens’s interior; beneath is a ewer set in a basin on a stand, the ewer being of an antique Roman type as engraved in 1531 by Agostino dei Musi, called Veneziano (about 1490–after 1536).¹⁰⁷ Beside the ledge, in a niche set off by two pilasters, is a small stone statue of Venus and Cupid whose design depends on the antique Venus Felix (Vatican, Musei Vaticani).¹⁰⁸ Rubens has crowned the goddess with a chaplet of red roses. Nearly the whole width of the painting is taken up by a low bed of a design similar to, and based on, that in an antique sarcophagus known to both Raphael and Giulio Romano.¹⁰⁹ The bed covering shows a wool pile carpet; its decoration is clearly inspired by and possibly directly reproduces contemporary Turkish patterns (fig. 22). While the elements and colours are completely consistent with a late sixteenth‐ or early seventeenth‐century Turkish attribution, their combination, effected by handling of exceptional freedom and boldness, seems unique and it thus may have been an invention of the artist.¹¹⁰ However, Rubens introduced the same carpet in the modello of Esther before Ahasuerus of around 1620 for a compartment in one of the ceilings in the aisles of the Antwerp Jesuit Church.¹¹¹

Treatment

Rubens chose to place the scene at night, with armoured Philistine soldiers waiting at the open door of the bedchamber. An old servant provides light for the young man as he goes about his barber’s task with elaborate care so as not to disturb Samson, whose trusting sleep is assured by the gentle weight of Delilah’s hand on his broad shoulder. Their dishabillé betrays their intimacy; Rubens has clothed Delilah in a full‐length, ample satin gown pulled down beneath her bare breasts; coloured in his favourite crimson, its intricate folds contrast with Samson’s muscular, naked back revealed by his recumbent pose supported by her crossed legs. By making the drama a nocturnal one, Rubens displayed his understanding of relations between lovers – that Delilah’s persistent questioning would have been pursued at night. He also quickly re‐emphasised his commitment to the fashion for night scenes recently popularised by Elsheimer in Rome.¹¹² Probably executed before Rubens left Rome in the late autumn of 1608 was Elsheimer’s Jupiter and Mercury in the House of Philemon and Baucis (Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie),¹¹³ in which the peasant front room resembles the layout of Delilah’s bedchamber, with the open door at the rear to the right (fig. 23). This night scene has three sources of artificial light, the most powerful being set at the far left; Rubens was more ambitious when lighting Delilah’s room, with a raised brass brazier in the left foreground and three less powerful candles illuminating the unfolding drama. He thus equalled what Elsheimer had earlier contrived in his Mocking of Ceres (in the lost prototype engraved by Goudt), which was said to have caused a stir in Rome (see fig. 21).¹¹⁴ That scene took place outside a cottage door; Rubens in his interior for Samson and Delilah set himself the added challenge of depicting the flickering effect of candlelight and the shadows cast by it on the room’s far wall and open door.

Physiognomies

Rubens undoubtedly followed accepted studio practice in making head studies while he was in Italy, although far fewer are extant than those he made later in Antwerp.¹¹⁵ None can be directly related to the four protagonists in Samson and Delilah, but similarity of features may point to the existence of lost studies. The same model for Delilah but with her hair differently styled may have been used for Judith beheading Holofernes as engraved, presumably in reverse, by Cornelis Galle I (and known as the ‘Great Judith’).¹¹⁶ In her features and that of Samson a shared paternity may be traced to saints Domitilla and Maurus in the first altarpiece for the Chiesa Nuova, Rome.¹¹⁷ Perhaps the same model for the young man cutting Samson’s hair had been earlier used for the shepherd looking upwards in the slightly later altarpiece for the Oratorian church in Fermo of 1608.¹¹⁸ He kneels beside an old woman who reappears standing above Delilah holding a candle and in the Cornelis Galle ‘Great Judith’; Rubens may have studied her face with, or at the same time as, Elsheimer in Rome, for she is likely to have been the model for the old woman in the Mocking of Ceres.

Date

In considering the dating of Samson and Delilah it has to be borne in mind that in order to render the forms in a candlelit room, Rubens probably deliberately adjusted his handling to the manner of Elsheimer from around 1605–8,¹¹⁹ who was an innovator and specialist in this field; thus a difference in Rubens’s handling can be expected for daylight scenes. A general consensus has placed the Samson in the years immediately after Rubens’s return to Antwerp from Italy in late 1608; the dendrochronology results are in keeping with this supposition (see above under Technical Notes). A sketch for Samson’s capture (see below) was painted over an abandoned sketch for the Adoration of the Magi (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado), commissioned to decorate the Statenkamer of the Antwerp town hall in early 1609.¹²⁰ The commissioning of this work by the city council, with Nicolaas Rockox then acting as burgomaster, would have brought the two men together, and it is in Rockox’s house that the Samson is first recorded a few years later. Philip Rubens (1574–1611), the artist’s brother, would also have been involved in this project as he was Antwerp’s town clerk (stadssecretaris); he died in August 1611.¹²¹ Stanzas by him were published in the prints after both the Judith beheading Holofernes (Judith and Holofernes) and the Samson and Delilah (see below). It is of course possible that these stanzas were written independently of Rubens’s painting activity; but it is argued here that the existence of poem and painting was more than just a coincidence and that they were likely composed in conjunction with each other; significantly, the couplets were chosen, sui generis, for publication in a volume of 1615 commemorating Philip’s life and achievements (see under Print, below). If poem and painting were composed together, then the paintings would have to have been executed, or in an advanced state, by the time of Philip’s death. There is no extant preparatory work for the Judith beheading Holofernes, and no figure studies such as exist for the Adoration of the Magi are extant for the Samson either (see below), but the compositional sketches indicate that time may have been spent in discussing the subject. Once the formulation had been settled, the execution of the painting was probably quickly effected. A date of 1609–11 for the Samson and Delilah would make it more or less contemporary with the Tarquin and Lucretia (see above under Provenance) and Cimon and Pero (St Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum), with both of which it has been compared.¹²²

Execution

This large easel painting was most likely created while Rubens developed his practice in Antwerp and when the complement of his studio was being established.¹²³ Seemingly painted with great expedition, there are no signs of hesitation, with the contours respected but for light and vigorous finishing touches in, for instance, the curls of Delilah’s hair (fig. 24), and only a few small revisions in Delilah’s breasts, the outline of the small finger of her left hand, the old woman’s headscarf and one slightly more substantial in the suppression of the equine head finial at the far foot of the bed (see above under Technical Notes).¹²⁴ The brush is handled with unerring confidence, the application of paint generous and sufficiently assured to allow the priming to show up here and there. The main points of light are rendered with rich impasto. Exceptional too is Rubens’s mastery in rendering the folds of Delilah’s satin costume contrasting their texture with that of Samson’s muscular back.

Preparatory Work

Three oil sketches with Samson and Delilah as the protagonists are extant, and are dated on stylistic grounds to around the time assigned to the finished painting; also extant is a pen drawing (private collection) clearly demarcating the composition (fig. 25). Followed here is the view that these works were the result of a single impetus rather than being preparatory for two entirely different outcomes.¹²⁵ The unfinished sketch in Madrid (Thyssen‐Bornemisza National Museum)¹²⁶ – not as yet the subject of technical analysis – is probably the earliest in the group (fig. 26). It depicts the turmoil of Samson’s capture and only relates to the finished painting in the night‐time setting and placement of Samson and Delilah. X‐radiographs of the sketch in the Art Institute of Chicago (fig. 27),¹²⁷ in which the influence of Boldrini’s woodcut after Titian has transformed the composition, shows that it was executed over an abandoned modello for the Adoration of the Magi of 1609 destined for the Antwerp town hall (see above). Also partially unfinished, this compares in its depiction of horror with the engraved Judith beheading Holofernes; it connects with the final painting once again in the candlelit setting and more obviously in the pose assigned to Delilah, although here she is pushing Samson away. At this juncture the narrative of violence was abandoned; in its place, the preceding moment of Samson’s betrayal with the change to a calmer mood was first explored in the pen‐and‐ink drawing (private collection),¹²⁸ in which the poses of the main actors are altered (although keeping Delilah’s raised right knee), while largely retaining Delilah’s and Samson’s physiognomy. In the spiral and vertical lines filling in the background we sense in part Rubens’s imagined verbal assurance that discussion of the detail to be introduced there was at that moment unnecessary. Indeed the modello now in the Cincinnati Art Museum (fig. 28)¹²⁹ follows, we sense, satisfaction with the new concept. It should be seen as the working sketch, for now the artist sets out his intentions with regard to the furnishings, an increase in the number of soldiers, the placement of Delilah’s legs, in the portrayal of Samson with his abundant, dark curly hair and beard, and the compressed arrangement of the heads of the main actors (with the young man now standing bent over his task at the centre of the action). But the modello was not followed down to the last detail as the artist allowed himself some latitude when working on the final painting. No preparatory studies from the life for the main figures are known or recorded; whether any were made must remain an open question.¹³⁰

Interpretation

When Rockox agreed to buy the Samson and Delilah or had suggested that the artist proceed further perhaps after viewing the modello (Cincinnati Art Museum), he most likely did so primarily because he saw in it a beautiful depiction of a well‐known biblical subject,¹³¹ which also had connotations with which he and his wife approved. Long understood would have been the idea that Samson’s love for Delilah symbolised Christ’s love of the Church, or counter‐intuitively, that Delilah’s betrayal of Samson prefigured the betrayal of Christ; also heeded would have been the implicit warning not to succumb to the temptation of earthly goods and carnal pleasure.¹³² But recognised too would have been a wider dimension of allusion not specifically Christian or moralistically admonitory, but rather intended to convey the power of women and the effects of love, signalled by the derivation of the statue of Venus Felix in the niche on the far wall of Delilah’s chamber.¹³³ The presence of the statue communicated a truth about the power and consequences of love related to that in a tapestry, depicting cupids leading a lion, placed above the entrance to the tent in which Holofernes met his end in Elsheimer’s Judith beheading Holofernes,¹³⁴ a work which Rubens no doubt admired and came to own. These Old Testament protagonists appeared together in book III of Petrarch’s Triumph of Cupid,¹³⁵ one of the series of ‘triumphs’ still sufficiently admired in the sixteenth century as to have been illustrated by Maarten van Heemskerck and engraved by Philips Galle (1537–1612) around 1565.¹³⁶ Samson resting his head in Delilah’s lap had been depicted in Cupid’s train on birth trays in fifteenth‐century Florence which were made as symbolic gifts to celebrate marriage and childbirth.¹³⁷ Submission of the hero to his beloved was not seen as dishonourable, and Samson and Delilah could be depicted as epitomising the ideal of marriage.¹³⁸ Philip Rubens’s jocular rather than cautionary In Sampsonem a femina superatum, which appeared we think at his brother’s prompting on Matham’s print (fig. 29), should be seen in this tradition (see under Print, below). Associated is another topos stemming perhaps from Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus; Delilah had been included in engraved series of the power of women in the Netherlands notably by Lucas van Leyden (about 1494–1533)¹³⁹ and then by Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck.¹⁴⁰ The power of women and the power of love, long conflated, came to be celebrated as an alternative to the influential misogynistic moralising long since expressed by the Church Father, Saint Jerome.¹⁴¹ In the same vein as Philip Rubens’s stanzas is Daniel Heinsius’s epithalamium on the artist’s marriage to Isabella Brant: ‘He [Rubens] has triumphed over heroes and / kings in daring to paint them with unrivalled skill / Even he yielded to love (and who has not been so enthralled?) / and become the play‐thing of tender maiden‐hood …’.¹⁴² The artist knew of the Roman custom of dressing brides with a garland of roses,¹⁴³ and in so adorning the statue of Venus in the painting, Rubens may have alluded to the idea of marriage and its grounding in the emotion of love rather than in the neo‐stoic sense merely of a contract.¹⁴⁴ In fact both Rubens and his brother had married in 1609, the year when he probably began to consider the theme of Samson and Delilah. And in a letter of 10 April 1609 to his friend and doctor Johan Faber in Rome, after his brother’s marriage, the artist wrote: ‘It was a fortunate hour when he [his brother] laid aside the scholar’s gown and dedicated himself to the service of Cupid.’ He ended by assuring the addressee that his brother was at his disposal ‘when his Juno gives him permission’.¹⁴⁵

Reception

It was only in 1977 that Samson and Delilah won international recognition. The prestigious exhibition of that year in Antwerp to celebrate the quatercentenary of Rubens’s birth provided the occasion for the painting’s first (internationally advertised) public display in the modern era.¹⁴⁶ A number of factors may account for the relative absence of attention in the decade following its discovery in 1929 (and perhaps noteworthy is the fact that Burchard did not award the painting the highest figure in his insurance valuation of Neuerburg’s collection);¹⁴⁷ a comprehensive art historical study was first undertaken by Hans Gerhard Evers, writing in the early 1940s.¹⁴⁸ But Evers’s achievement in describing the context of the Samson and Delilah and setting the agenda for its future study was obscured by the fact that his work was initially available mainly to subjects of the Third Reich, and his reputation was to be blighted, after its defeat, by his Nazi affiliation.¹⁴⁹ However, his Rubens studies were known to Ellis Waterhouse, the leading British connoisseur of his generation and a member of the Allies’ Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives programme, who examined the painting soon after the end of the war in Europe. By then he was the second non‐German we know of to have seen it; he noted enthusiastically: ‘Superb … Superb condition … Really very stunning indeed …’.¹⁵⁰ In the following decades the painting was familiar only to specialists, in black‐and‐white reproductions, until its debut in 1977. Its impact then is best described by the distinguished art historian and director of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, Willibald Sauerländer, for whom it outshone all the other exhibits executed up to 1614 and was the great surprise of the exhibition.¹⁵¹ Thus when the painting, described as ‘stupendous’ by the leading English specialist on Rubens of his day,¹⁵² came up for auction three years later, it would have come as no surprise that it was acquired – for what was then the third highest price for an old master at auction – by an institution of the first rank, the National Gallery. Indeed Federico Zeri, a prominent Italian art historian, described it as one of the top masterpieces to have appeared at auction since the war (that is, since 1945).¹⁵³ Yet some twenty‐five years later, Christopher White, a much respected British connoisseur and art historian, found it necessary to conclude his review of the National Gallery exhibition Rubens: A Master in the Making, in which the painting had been displayed beside two other near contemporary showpieces, ‘with the hope that the Samson and Delilah seen in its present context should at last be freed from the persistent and ill‐founded canard that it is not by the Master’.¹⁵⁴ But that hope was in vain as the campaign continues,¹⁵⁵ with its upholders partial to publicity but blind to the dynamic creative drive that suffuses the painting.

The Print

The Samson and Delilah was engraved by the Haarlem‐based Jacob Matham (see fig. 29),¹⁵⁶ with extensive lettering consisting of verses, the imperial copyright, and signatures in the margin;¹⁵⁷ inserted into the field is a dedication on a feigned tablet.¹⁵⁸ Matham had received an unlimited imperial copyright in 1601,¹⁵⁹ and the verses were by Philip Rubens, the artist’s elder brother, published posthumously by the Plantin press in St Asterius, Homiliae Graece et Latine nunc primum editae Philippo Rubenio interprete. Eiusdem Rubenii Carmina, orationes, et epistolae selectiores: itemque Amicorum in vita functum Pietas, 1615.¹⁶⁰ The dedication by Matham is to Nicolaas Rockox, described as the owner of the painting in whose house it could be admired.

There are differences between the painting and the print, which is oblong rather than nearly square. There are five soldiers at the door in the painting and three with fiercer demeanours, in the print. In the print the man cutting Samson’s hair is beardless, Delilah is wearing a pearl earring, the carpet differs,¹⁶¹ the decoration of the bed itself is more elaborate and there are three jars on the shelf instead of two, while the ewer is missing (there are other minor differences in the background fittings). The door frame is wider in the print; a latch has been added to the door, and the whole foot of Samson’s extended leg is shown. Finally, in the fourth state of the print, long, curly hair is falling onto Delilah’s shoulder (probably not Rubens’s alteration).

Some of these details concur with the oil sketch in Cincinnati (see fig. 28),¹⁶² and it has been assumed that the print must have been based on it.¹⁶³ However, there are also differences between the print and the modello; most notably the animal heads decorating the bed are missing in the oil sketch. Even in these early years of Rubens’s renewed practice in Antwerp, it seems unlikely that he would have lent to an engraver a modello in oils for a painting, or – from Matham’s point of view – whether such a sketch on panel would have been considered more suitable as a prototype than a drawing on paper. The modello for the ‘Great Judith’, drawn on paper in chalk by Cornelis Galle with corrections in pen by Rubens (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum), is an example of how collaboration between painter and engraver would have worked at this stage of Rubens’s career.¹⁶⁴

Similarly doubtful is the theory that Rubens sought out Matham as a collaborator during his visit to the northern Netherlands in 1612.¹⁶⁵ In practice, the initiative for the production of reproductive prints lay rather with the engraver and publisher.¹⁶⁶ Rubens was likely to have been asked to provide drawings for the two earliest dated prints after his paintings of 1611 and 1612,¹⁶⁷ as was probably the case with Matham’s print after Samson and Delilah,¹⁶⁸ for which he also owned the copyright. Why Matham should have sought out this particular privately owned painting in Antwerp can only be a matter for speculation;¹⁶⁹ perhaps the painting was already famous, although Dominicus Baudius (1561–1613) did not cite it in 1611 when describing paintings he had heard of by Rubens in private collections.¹⁷⁰ It is thus worth considering whether an approach to Matham may have been made by Rockox playing an intermediary role similar to that he performed between Rubens and Jacob de Bie in 1611.¹⁷¹

Rubens’s drawing, which is presumed to have served as the prototype for the engraving, would have represented his further thoughts on the composition. Only he (rather than Matham) is likely to have had the antiquarian expertise required to elaborate the detail decorating Delilah’s bed. In the painting, Rubens depicted only one equine head, which in contemporary antiquarian literature was generally interpreted as that of a donkey; the second head, of a ‘panther’, is absent because Delilah’s dress was shown covering the lower part of the bed, but it was introduced into the print.¹⁷² The type of antique bed, with zoomorphic bronze finials decorating the head and foot boards, was known from Etruscan‐Roman tombs; similar furniture had been depicted by Giulio Romano in his Two Lovers (St Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum; see above) and Raphael in Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (Vatican, Loggia).¹⁷³ Rubens had discussed these couch/bed fittings (the Latin sponda) during his time in Rome, as is suggested in the transcribed notes listing random Roman customs on a page of his ‘Italian Itinerary’, which the artist probably made while in conversation with an expert on antiquarian matters, perhaps the collector Lelio Pasqualino.¹⁷⁴ Here, Rubens had described the ‘Aerea (bronzes) at the end of the couch, decorated with donkey and panther heads’, which he thought to be part of the ornamentation of the bed rather than pins to hold the mattress in place, as his interlocutor seems to have believed.¹⁷⁵ In the winged ‘panther’ decoration uniquely displayed in the print (and in the Renaissance drawings after the sarcophagus) on the base of the bed, Rubens showed his knowledge of the actual sarcophagus (or a copy drawing) on which these discussions had depended.¹⁷⁶

Rubens’s involvement in the production of the print is further suggested by the five different states betraying its laborious genesis;¹⁷⁷ these could be seen as a sign of possible requests for improvements. A proof copy of the first state (Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet) may have been retouched by Rubens himself.¹⁷⁸ Earlier in the process he would have been called on to make adjustments to accommodate the dedication and epigram whose placement would have been decided on by Matham. Evidence of their having communicated by letter is Matham’s spelling of Pauolo, which was the form used by Rubens in his epistolary leave‐taking, in the artist’s name he had inscribed on the print.

Cornelis Galle in the ‘Great Judith’ had positioned the dedication beneath Philip Rubens’s verses, but perhaps because the paper available to Matham provided even less space it was decided to adopt the unusual expedient of a feigned tablet placed within the image – an adaptation of the simple rectangular insertion introduced by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617) in his 1594 engraving of the Annunciation.¹⁷⁹ The tablet was inserted in the bottom left‐hand corner, thus requiring the widening of the field which determined the introduction of a substantial door frame and the whole foot of Samson’s extended leg, mentioned above.

The inclusion of the four lines of verse by Philip Rubens is likely to have been made at his younger brother’s insistence, we think, as had been the case with the ‘Great Judith’ engraved by Cornelis Galle. The presence there of verses by Philip Rubens suggests that the brothers had planned to collaborate in the production of prints, a project that would have ended with Philip’s death in 1611.¹⁸⁰ Both sets of verses were published in 1615; but both may well have been composed as the paintings were being executed and were thus known to the artist while he worked. This seems a more likely eventuality than the verses being written independently, with Matham (and Galle) then searching the 1615 publication as a means of finding relevant quotations.

If such was the case, then the date of 1615 would no longer have to be considered a terminus post quem for the production of the print.¹⁸¹ A copy of the second state (London, British Museum) is inscribed in ink with the date 1611, as perhaps is a proof in Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet), although the date is indistinct.¹⁸² The presence of these inscriptions may be fortuitous, but there is no good reason why they could not accurately indicate the date of the print’s publication. Indeed in support, various dates have been proposed from between 1611 and 1614,¹⁸³ with Vermeylen and De Clippel recently opting for about 1612–13.¹⁸⁴

Jacob Matham, the successor of Goltzius in Haarlem, had run his stepfather’s workshop from around 1599; he had joined the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1600.¹⁸⁵ At the time of the production of Samson and Delilah the engraver was at the height of his powers. He had already made prints after works by the Antwerp‐based artist Sebastian Vrancx (1573–1647).¹⁸⁶ Further, there may already have been connections between Matham and humanist circles in Antwerp, since Matham’s portrait print of 1608 of the Leiden professor Dominicus Baudius, himself an acquaintance of Philip Rubens, featured an inscription by Rubens’s close friend Johannes Woverius (Jan van den Wouwer) (1576–1636).¹⁸⁷ In 1611 Matham produced an engraving after a lost Saint Francis in Ecstasy by Adam Elsheimer, in which Brother Leo reads by the light of a candle in the background.¹⁸⁸ The print displays Matham’s skill in rendering the tonal values of a night scene – by, as it happened, Rubens’s deceased friend; it might have provided an additional reason for Rubens to react favourably to a likely request emanating from Matham, maybe prompted by Rockox, for a drawing from which he could engrave Samson and Delilah.

Influence

For a painting executed for private ownership, Samson and Delilah had a limited but noteworthy influence.¹⁸⁹ In an early instance the picture – probably the painting itself rather than the print – made a profound impression on the Antwerp prodigy Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641); later, but still in Rubens’s lifetime, the composition was influential in the northern Netherlands through the medium of Matham’s print. And two years after the artist’s death, memories of the composition surfaced in a work by Pieter Claesz Soutman (1593/1601–1657), a northern Netherlandish artist who had been active in Rubens’s studio a quarter of a century earlier (see below).

Executed early in his career, Van Dyck’s Samson and Delilah (London, Dulwich Picture Gallery)¹⁹⁰ was obviously inspired by Rubens’s composition. The young artist, who was also active in Rubens’s studio, could have had access to the preparatory work. But it is likely he had knowledge of the painting itself, then securely in Rockox’s house in the Keizerstraat, as about this time Rockox sat to Van Dyck for his portrait¹⁹¹ in which some of the sitter’s possessions are displayed, thus showing the young artist’s acquaintance with the interior of the house. While the imposing size (152.3 x 232 cm), horizontal format, configuration of the protagonists (although in reverse) and the pose of Samson speak of Van Dyck’s admiration of the Rubens, it is also evident that Van Dyck intended to emulate his mentor by altering the setting and abandoning the drama of a night scene. Van Dyck clearly determined that it was more effective to depict the Philistine advancing to cut Samson’s hair rather than showing him at work; more telling and influential is Delilah’s gesture requesting silence.

It would seem that Rockox’s painting was also known about this time to the specialist in small‐scale figure subjects, the versatile Frans Francken II, who later made a free copy of it when he painted a capriccio view of the ‘groote Saleth’ of Rockox’s house (see fig. 16) (see above): a rough copy is depicted in a much‐reduced size propped against a table in the centre of one of Francken’s depictions of the Interior of a Picture Gallery with Scholars, which has been dated about 1615.¹⁹² That it is a reduced copy of Rockox’s painting can be inferred from the supposition that Francken would not have had access to the modello retained, we think, in Rubens’s workshop.

Bought by the city of Dordrecht for the Dordrecht town hall in 1632, the Samson and Delilah (Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum) by Christiaen van Couwenbergh (1604–1667)¹⁹³ active in Delft clearly owed much to Matham’s engraving, with the Philistine at the door advancing into the room. Perhaps connected in some way is the equally large Samson and Delilah (Vienna, Akademie der bildenden Künste) by Abraham Bloemaert (1566–1651),¹⁹⁴ which is the Utrecht artist’s largest work save for his altarpieces and where the influence of the print is also apparent. Pieter Claesz Soutman (1593/1601–1657) was active in Rubens’s studio when he was in Antwerp between 1616 and 1624, and there he seems to have known both the Rubens and the Van Dyck; his memory of both masterpieces is apparent in his painting executed in Haarlem in 1642 (York Art Gallery).¹⁹⁵

Framing

In Frans Francken II’s view of the ‘groote Saleth’ of Rockox’s house in the early 1630s, in which Samson and Delilah is shown above the fireplace, the painting bears a cabinetmaker’s frame of a dark brown veneer and gilded mouldings (see fig. 16). This could have been the original frame, as its flat frieze is contemporary with Rubens’s painting.¹⁹⁶ A new frame was provided before the painting’s export to Vienna; the invoice of 5 June 1699 for this and one other painting bought by Marcus Forchondt also lists the cost for a new gilt frame (een vergulde leyst).¹⁹⁷ Samson and Delilah was reframed again when it entered the Liechtenstein collection. In 1706 the sculptor Giovanni Giuliani provided a carved cartouche which would have crowned the (new black) frame and which probably looked similar to the gilded cartouches ornamented with foliate motifs, lion’s heads and laurel wreaths which are still attached to the top rails of the black and gold frames on the Decius Mus series.¹⁹⁸ When the collection was transferred from the City Palace to the Garden Palace in Rossau in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Johann I commissioned neoclassical‐style frames for almost all the paintings. In the hanging plans of 1815 by the gallery director Joseph Anton Bauer, Samson and Delilah is shown in a relatively plain Biedermeier‐style frame (see under Provenance, Vienna, above).¹⁹⁹

Samson and Delilah entered the National Gallery collection in a reproduction frame which resembled that depicted in Francken’s painting; it had probably been commissioned by Dr Benedict & Co., Berlin, or August Neuerburg after conservation work in the 1930s.²⁰⁰ For the special exhibition at the National Gallery in 1983, when the painting was hung above a replica of the chimney piece in the ‘groote Saleth’, it was reframed in a reproduction cabinetmaker’s frame, based on an interpretation of that in the Francken.²⁰¹ Samson and Delilah was again reframed in 2005.²⁰² The new design was based on the contemporary framing of the former high altarpiece of St Jacob’s, Antwerp, by Ambrosius Francken the Elder (1544–1618) of 1609–10.²⁰³

Notes