A long-standing debate over the authenticity of a work by 17th-century Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens at the National Gallery in London has reignited with a new book that claims the museum’s version of Samson and Delilah is a 20th-century copy—an assertion leading scholars firmly reject.
Samson and Delilah (1609–10) was acquired by the National Gallery in 1980 at a Christie’s sale for £2.5 million (or around $5 million at the time), which was then a record sum. The painting portrays the moment when Delilah has just betrayed Samson by seducing him and later having an accomplice cut his hair, so robbing him of his superhuman strength. According to historical documents, the work was commissioned by the artist’s friend Nicolaas II Rockox and its use of contrasting light and rich colors was inspired by a trip to Italy, where Rubens had admired the work of Caravaggio. At the National Gallery, it is featured as one of 30 major highlights in the museum’s collection.
So why has the masterpiece inspired so much speculation over its authenticity over the years? Let’s break down the drama.
Missing For Three Centuries
The original painting vanished around 1641, shortly after Rockox’s death, according to records. When the work resurfaced in Paris in 1929, it was first attributed to artist Gerrit van Honthorst, a Dutch follower of Caravaggio. Yet, Ludwig Burchard, a German scholar and Rubens expert, declared the painting was a work by Rubens and signed a certificate of authenticity attesting to his authorship.
When Burchard died in 1960, it came to light that he had falsely authenticated some 60 works as genuine Rubens for his own commercial benefit. Dozens of works have “subsequently been demoted in the Corpus Rubenianum itself,” according to ArtWatch U.K., an independent group that monitors art conservators and museums, which has been following the Samson and Delilah saga for years.
Still, Antwerp’s Rubenshuis, the artist’s former home and workshop, maintains that Burchard was the “greatest Rubens experts of the 20th century” and the historian’s collection of writings forms the core of the organization’s library.
Discrepancies in the Details?
Greek artist and writer Euphrosyne Doxiadis has spent several decades analyzing Samson and Delilah for her new book NG6461: The Fake Rubens, which has recently renewed interest in the work’s history. In the book, which will be published on March 12 by Columbia University Press, Doxiadis claims the National Gallery’s canvas is a copy. As the author revealed in 2021, her suspicion began immediately upon seeing the work for the first time in 1987. She submitted a report detailing her concerns to the museum in 1992 and founded a website dedicated to debunking the picture.
Doxiadis is part of a dedicated community of doubters, which includes Michael Daley of ArtWatch U.K. and independent researcher Kasia Pisarek. In her new book, Doxiadis has focused on specific details of the painting that she believes are of a subpar quality that is inconceivably of Rubens’s hand, which she demonstrates via comparison with known masterpieces. Another key example in her argument, according to the Guardian, is the fact that the toes on Samson’s foot are cut off at the edge of the composition; yet Samson’s toes are visible in a 17th-century copy of the original by Jacob Matham.
Samson and Delilah (ca. 1612) by Jacob Matham, after Peter Paul Rubens. Photo by: Sepia Times/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
A spokesperson for the National Gallery said in a statement that Samson and Delilah “has long been accepted by Rubens scholars.” The museum has found no cause to update an initial technical examination of the painting undertaken in 1983, from which “the findings remain valid.”
It is true that, despite the marginal but adamant voices of researchers like Doxiadis, top scholars in the field support Samson and Delilah‘s authenticity unequivocally. Chief among these is Nils Büttner, chairman of the Centrum Rubenianum in Antwerp, who is working on the Corpus Rubenianum, the definitive catalogue raisonné for the Flemish Baroque painter. He has previously described the doubts about Samson and Delilah‘s provenance as “conspiracy theories.”
Büttner declined to comment on Doxiadis’s book.
For her part, Doxiadis described the Centrum Rubenianum as engaging in “hero-worship” of Burchard in spite of the scholar’s misattributions. Likening herself to Renaissance artist, historian, and biographer Giorgio Vasari, “it is us painters who can speak and write more than validly about paintings,” she said, addressing the difference in her background and that of the scholars she is opposing. “We know what we make.”
Büttner’s position is backed by his peers like Adam Busiakiewicz, a lecturer and consultant on Old Master paintings for Sotheby’s. He pointed out to the Telegraph that Doxiadis is not a scholar of the period and has mostly published on Greco-Roman antiquities previously. Though she “had a hunch the quality of the picture wasn’t good enough” he said, “I think there are some misunderstandings about the painting.”
Connoisseurship Conundrum
Busiakiewicz explained that a comparison between Samson and Delilah and other paintings by Rubens are complicated, especially when they were made decades apart. “He’s an artist that changed his style throughout his career,” he said. “Art historians who specialize in paintings like Rubens’ can track these changes.” It is for this reason that the National Gallery painting has been connected to Rubens’s interest in the work of Caravaggio and other Renaissance masters whose work he had, at that time, recently encountered while traveling in Italy.
Rubens’ Samson and Delilah (1610) goes on show during the press preview of Rubens : A Master in the Making inside the National Gallery in central London. Photo: Johnny Green, PA Images via Getty Images.
“I would also say that when you work for an auction house like I have, when you start to see paintings en masse, you understand that copies have a dead quality that is nothing like a masterpiece,” added Busiakiewicz. “It’s very easy to spot a 20th century copy—the pigments will feel different, and you don’t see any of that here.”
This is not the first time that claims against the authenticity of Samson and Delilah have made headlines. In 2021, the Swiss tech start-up Art Recognition analyzed a digital reproduction of the painting using an A.I. it had trained to identify paintings by Rubens, concluding that there was a 91 percent chance it was fake.
“I was so shocked,” Carina Popovici, the cofounder of Art Recognition, told the Guardian at the time. “We repeated the experiments to be really sure that we were not making a mistake, and the result was always the same.”
Another Rubens work in the museum’s collection, A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, fared better under the A.I. analysis, which found there was a 98.8 percent chance it was actually done by the artist.
While A.I. art authentication is gaining traction, its reliability remains uncertain—especially in complex cases like Rubens, who collaborated with workshops across multiple mediums.
In 2021, Art Recognition’s claim about Samson and Delilah was not backed by a peer-reviewed academic paper, and the National Gallery therefore reasonably concluded that, until the research was published in full “so that any evidence can be properly assessed,” it would “not be possible to comment further.” Further evidence has not yet been provided.
