JAN STEEN’S SOBER SIDE IN ‘SAMSON’

A sleeping Titan is about to be shorn of his long, curly locks--and robbed of his strength--in a recently acquired painting that goes on view today at the County Museum of Art.

“Samson and Delilah,” painted in 1668 by Dutch master Jan Steen, is the latest gift to the museum from the Ahmanson Foundation. Acquired at an undisclosed price from a Dutch private collection, the richly detailed oil is a major biblical work by an artist better known for comic genre scenes.

“It’s a great painting,” says Scott Schaefer, the museum’s curator of European paintings and sculpture. A gem of high drama and exquisite detail, the 26-by-32-inch canvas seems certain to attract an admiring audience.

It will also surprise viewers who are unfamiliar with the sober, moralistic side of Steen, as well as those who never think of 17th-Century Dutch painting in terms of historical subject matter.

According to Schaefer, Americans’ inclination to categorize art of the Netherlands’ golden era as still lifes, landscapes, portraits and genre scenes--to the exclusion of traditional narratives--is merely a reflection of “collecting tastes.” Individual and institutional collections in the United States have given us “a false sense of Dutch painting” by concentrating on those four areas and ignoring such “subject pictures” as this work by Steen, he says.

Scholars, however, deem the museum’s new addition to be an important example from the Dutch master’s most significant period. Schaefer places the work in league with only two other Steens in American collections: the Cleveland Museum of Art’s “Esther and Ahasuerus” and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s “Man Striking a Rock.” While works by Steen are not in short supply--about 400 paintings survive--”Samson and Delilah” enhances his reputation by proving the breadth of his range.

Steen (1625-79) has been so closely identified with comical scenes of rowdy beer halls and festivals that “a Jan Steen household” became a popular Dutch description of an unkempt dwelling. But he was unusually versatile, turning out portraits of adults and children, still lifes, religious pictures and interpretations of mythological and historical subjects.

Because of his fondness for tavern scenes, Steen himself has been labeled a drunk by latter-day historians, but Schaefer says that concept is only “a romantic myth.” While there are few documents of any kind about Steen’s life, “there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that he was anything other than an assiduous painter, working very hard at his craft” and enjoying great popularity, the curator says.

In “Samson and Delilah,” Steen found a theme that allowed him to treat a biblical subject seriously while incorporating aspects of ordinary life that populate his genre scenes. He painted the picture while living in Haarlem and maintaining close ties with theatrical companies.

The “Samson and Delilah” theme was enacted on stage by Steen’s contemporaries, according to Schaefer. In his painted version, Steen stops the action just prior to the world’s most celebrated haircut--after Samson had killed 1,000 Philistines with the jawbone of an ass and before he was blinded and publicly ridiculed by his Philistine captors. The “actors” in the painting wear theatrical costumes, not period clothing, and the setting is said to closely resemble an actual stage in Amsterdam.

Delilah, portrayed as a self-satisfied temptress, holds Samson’s head in her lap and reaches for a pair of scissors while an apprehensive barber prepares to separate the strong man from his source of power. The central trio play their parts to the hilt on an Oriental carpet thrown across a stagelike foreground.

Meanwhile, an unsavory band of Philistines lurks in the background, whispering and conniving in the shadows of draperies and pillars. Off in the lower right corner, two urchins innocently play with a dog, oblivious to the calamity behind them.

According to the tale that originates in the Old Testament Book of Judges, Samson got his revenge when his hair grew again and his prayers gave him strength to pull down a temple, killing himself and 3,000 Philistines. He lives in memory as an exemplar of sexual passion leading to destruction.