The Good Samaritan (1849) by Eugène Delacroix

When I first saw Marian Kamp’s vibrantly colored drawing of The Good Samaritan at the Marvelous Miracles: Outsider Art and Bible Stories exhibition at Amsterdam’s Bijbelsmuseum in the fall of 2010, I immediately recognized a “family connection” to one of my favorite paintings by Modern Dutch Master Vincent van Gogh. On a trip to the Netherlands a few months earlier, I had trekked out to the Kroller-Muller Museum in the middle of the Hoge Veluwe National Park in Otterlo to spend some time with the same van Gogh painting of the New Testament parable, which had inspired Outsider Artist Kamp’s striking mixed media work.