Christ and the Samaritan Woman, from A Life 1884

Max Klinger made this etching, “Christ and the Samaritan Woman,” as part of his portfolio titled “A Life.” Klinger was a German Symbolist artist. This image illustrates a scene from the Gospel of John, but Klinger updates it to his own time. Here we see a woman offering Christ water from a well. In the Bible, Christ asks the woman to call her husband, and she admits that she has no husband but has had five, and is now living with another man. This suggests that they were both social outcasts, and this is why Klinger might have chosen this particular scene. The portfolio as a whole reflects anxieties about modern life, industrialization, and urbanization in Germany at the end of the 19th century. To understand this image better, we might look into writings on the rise of secularism during this time, and on the changing role of women in German society. It reminds us that art is inseparable from its social and institutional contexts.