Christ and the Samaritan Woman

Van Vliet is best known for a series of prints that reproduced early paintings by Rembrandt. Because of that, he is often seen through the lens of Rembrandt scholarship, but that is a something of a distorting lens. Van Vliet's work and role was broader and more interesting than simply that of a follower of one master. Here, for example, he reproduces a composition by a different Leiden painter, Joris van Schooten. Such reproductive (or "translational") prints were extremely important in the seventeenth century, when paintings were far more often known in reproduction than in the original. This is one of van Vliet's finest prints, in a magnificent impression that has a long and distinguished history, having passed through several of the most important collections of the nineteenth century. It has long been an object of desire on its own terms.