Le Bon Samaritain [The Good Samaritan]

The eccentric, self-taught Rodolphe Bresdin was celebrated by the younger Symbolists, including his student Odilon Redon, as a visionary who suffered poverty for his art. In his decadent novel "À rebours [Against Nature]," Joris-Karl Huysmans describes Bresdin’s intricate rendering of the parable of the Good Samaritan as resembling a work by Albrecht Dürer, “composed under the influence of opium.” In a clearing amidst a minutely detailed, exotic forest, a man in Arab dress kneels beside a camel to attend to a wounded man; Jerusalem is visible in the distance. The biblical story tells of a Samaritan who, despite the enmity between their people, aided a wounded Jewish man whom others had ignored. Bresdin’s original title casts the contemporary Algerian Emir Abd el-Kader in the Samaritan’s role, celebrating the heroism he demonstrated in rescuing thousands of Christians and Jews from an 1860 massacre in Damascus, Syria. Bresdin’s print recognizes the emir as living Jesus’s command to “Love your neighbor as yourself.”