The Levite at Gibeah

Gerbrand van den Eeckhout

National Gallery of Art

Four people, a dog, and a donkey are gathered next to a copse of trees and in front of a run-down town in the background in this horizontal painting. All the people have pale skin. To the left, a barefoot man with a long gray beard and a fur-trimmed cap stands holding a tool in one hand and his other extended toward the other people. He wears a loose white shirt, and a dagger hangs from the waist of his tan, knee-length pants. A brown and white dog sniffs, with head lowered, one of the man’s bare feet. The man’s face is heavily lined and he looks at the second man and a woman in the lower right quadrant of the painting with deep-set eyes. There, a man wearing a harvest-yellow robe under a red cape and a feathered, jeweled turban sits on a rock. He looks back at the first with his head resting in one hand and his other hand held up. This second man has chin-length, wavy brown hair and a dark blond mustache and thin beard. A rosette or other object is tied at his waist, and the hilt of a sword is visible behind his hip. The woman sits on the ground next to him, one arm draped over his lap. She wears a gray headscarf and a teal cloak over a golden yellow dress. The thumb on her other hand is hooked through the red, studded collar of a tiny gray dog in her lap. The dog bares its teeth at the first man. A wooden casket and a basket holding cloth and a jug are just behind the woman. Behind that are two donkeys and the fourth person, a clean-shaven man who peers over the donkeys’ backs at the seated man. Trees to the right grow up around a mostly hidden structure. Grasses and plants grow along the ruined rooflines of the town behind the first man. A bank of khaki-brown and carnation-pink clouds billow up in the sky above, which deepens from pale blue along the top of the canvas to pale petal pink along the horizon.