North Carolina Museum of Art

After drinking water given to him from a well by a woman of Samaria, Christ compares the water with salvation, saying, "...whoever drinks the water I give him shall never thirst." Like Claude, Pierre Mignard studied and practised his art in Rome. In twenty years there he developed a style based on the clarity of drawing and the colors of Bolognese artists, whose works are also represented in the Museum's collection. In France Mignard and this particular canvas were admired by the nation's supreme arbiter of taste, King Louis XIV. An observer writing from Versailles records in a letter Louis's reaction to seeing the new picture in the collection of a prominent family. "The king found [the Woman of Samaria] so beautiful that he could not help showing that he would very much have liked to own it." Louis, however, had to be content with a much smaller replica he commissioned from Mignard in 1690, the year that he elevated the artist to the positions of First Painter to the King and Director of the French Academy. Louis's picture is today in the Louvre, but most of Mignard's more important commissions, for the decoration of rooms at Versailles and elsewhere, have been destroyed. This is his most important work in an American collection.