"The Good Samaritan"

The Samaritan, an elderly man, has a face wrinkled by age and poverty that nevertheless exudes kindness and gentleness. Heavily influenced by Spanish art of the 17th century, Morot depicted the subject with a severe realism. It was one of a number of paintings on Christian themes selected for the 1880 Salon, many of which were characterized as having anatomical precision and scientific naturalism.

Most of Morot's work consists of oil paintings, although he used other media. For his oil paintings on canvas, Aimé Morot had a preference for a color palette consisting of silver white, zinc white, yellow ochre, red ochre, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, raw sienna, burnt sienna, cobalt blue, emerald green, rose madder, carmine lake and ivory black. His painting medium consisted of oil mixed with some turpentine or sometimes with copal. He would start his painting by making a rough outline of the entire subject on a well-dried oiled canvas using a brush or charcoal, then applied the paint. When the completed painting had dried for a long time, he finally applied a light varnish