Hannah Brings Samuel to the Temple

During four summers in the second decade of the twentieth century, Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins was the camp photographer at a summer camp in Eliot, Maine, run by Elizabeth Lanier and Sidney Lanier Jr. Watkins took hundreds of photographs of camp activities (O’Connor & Tweedie 2007: 45), including Bible performances in the woods, offered on Sundays as an alternative to churchgoing. The forest provided the setting and often ‘the individuals dissolve into an organic whole—a tableau vivant that borrows its form from the history of painting’ (ibid: 51).

This photograph shows Hannah handing over her son to Eli. Every detail of the scene has been precisely arranged. All the male characters are wearing white costumes. The seated Eli is flanked by his two sons, Hophni and Phinehas (1 Samuel 1:3), who look more or less the same age as Samuel. Hannah and Samuel have entered the scene from the right.

Hannah is in a long, dark dress which clearly sets her apart from the Temple entourage in its lighter clothing. Samuel’s white tunic indicates that he belongs to the Temple now rather than to his mother. However, the arrangement of the figures ensures that Eli and his sons constitute one distinct group, and Hannah and Samuel another—an impression reinforced by Hannah’s gesture of putting her right hand on Samuel’s shoulder while looking down at him. Samuel is in transition. The gaze of the high priest Eli is focussed on the boy and Samuel seems to return the look with an open and enquiring expression on his face. He does not turn back towards his mother.

By contrast with many other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century renderings of the scene, there is here a distinct lack of obvious emotion. Yet, Watkins has inserted a woman’s view of this episode into the long history of its visualization in which male perspectives have dominated.

Watkins—a single woman—was making a career for herself, taking photographs in male domains and entering the masculine commercial word of advertising (O’Connor & Tweedie 2007: 10). Instead of an emotional, self-sacrificing mother who is subject to male scrutiny, here we see the figure of Hannah as an active participant in the scene. Rather than subjecting her son to abandonment, we see her placing him into the centre of the action: the life of the Temple for which she has prepared him.

References

O'Connor, Mary and Katherine Tweedie. 2007. Seduced by Modernity: The Photography of Margaret Watkins, Montreal (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press)

In Dutch art, family portraits with an emphasis on familial affection as well as so-called portraits historiés (historicized portraits) became increasingly popular during the seventeenth century. These two popular forms could be combined.

The episode of Samuel presented to Eli at Shiloh allowed a focus on familial relationships, as Hannah and Elkanah take leave of their son. At least one painting of the scene—made by Lambert Doomer (1624–1700) and now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts Orléans (Inv. No. 69.6.1)—is known to be an historicized family portrait. The painting was commissioned by François Wijnants, portrayed as Elkanah, and Alida Essings, portrayed as Hannah, after the death of four children and out of gratitude for the birth of their youngest son, François, depicted in the painting as little Samuel (Pastoor 1994: 128–29).

Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621–74) took up the subject of Elkanah and Hannah bringing Samuel to Eli at least three times. Although definitive evidence is lacking, this version—now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford—is considered by some to be an historicized family portrait like Doomer’s, showing an actual Dutch family.

The high priest Eli sits on a richly decorated wooden armchair, positioned sideways-on to the viewer, in front of an altar on which a golden vessel and an open Bible stand. He is dressed in magnificently ornamented attire, wearing a priestly headdress. No sacrificial animal can clearly be detected; maybe it is being brought by the far-off people in the dark background at left.

In front of Hannah and Samuel, a vessel with flour and a beautifully decorated jar of wine (1 Samuel 1:24) can be discerned. Hannah is kneeling on the floor and holding Samuel’s hand, while Elkanah stands behind them. Samuel, in a long and luminously white robe, is the only one turning towards the viewer.

Father, mother, and son form a very close group, embodying the period’s regnant view of the central importance of family.

The child holds a round, golden object in his left hand. This may prompt reflection on the painting itself as a valuable commodity. Whether or not they were historicized portraits, depictions of family—like paintings of the Presentation of Samuel in the Temple commissioned on the occasion like the birth of a child—also functioned to raise and confirm a family’s social status (Nakamura 2014: 47) and display its wealth.

References

Nakamura, Toshiharu. 2014. ‘An Introduction to Interpreting Images of Family, Mother and Child, and the Home’, in Images of Familial intimacy in Eastern and Western Art, ed. by Toshiharu Nakamura (Leiden: Brill), pp. 1–53

Pastoor, Gabriël M. C. 1994. ‘Biblische Historienbilder im Goldenen Zeitalter in Privatbesitz’, Im Lichte Rembrandts. Das Alte Testament im Goldenen Zeitalter der niederländischen Kunst, ed. by Christian Tümpel et al. (Zwolle: Waanders Verlag), pp. 122–33

From the twelfth century onwards, the story of Hannah bringing Samuel to the Temple was a constitutive element in European illuminated manuscripts. The widest distribution of this scene can be found in the Speculum Humanae Salvationis (Mirror of Human Salvation), an anonymous composition, originally written in Latin sometime between 1309 and 1324 and translated into every major European language (Nielsen 2022: 1). One third of the 420 extant copies of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis are illustrated. The composition of the example exhibited here is very typical: Samuel is shown standing on the altar, flanked by Eli to the left and Hannah to the right.

The Speculum Humanae Salvationis provided a typological approach combining Old and New Testaments and embodied a very influential model of medieval biblical interpretation. Each of its forty-two chapters comprises four episodes, and each episode has its own illumination appearing above a column of text (Nielsen 2022: 2).

The scene of Samuel brought by Hannah to Shiloh in chapter 10 of the Speculum is paralleled with the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (Luke 2:22–35). The compositional arrangements are similar in both depictions: the infant Jesus is usually shown sitting or standing upright on an altar between Mary and Simeon, who are positioned symmetrically at either side. However, the figures in the New Testament scene are depicted as smaller than Eli and Hannah, and accompanied by two more figures, namely Joseph and the prophetess Anna.

Between those two presentation scenes, images of the Ark of the Covenant together with the rod of Aaron flanked by a vessel of Manna and the book of the Law (Exodus 25:10–22), and a seven-branched lampstand (Exodus 25:31–40) can be found. The Ark and the menorah were seen as an antitype of Mary: as the ark contained the Ten Commandments, so Mary is seen as the vessel for the incarnate deity (Nielsen 2022: 94). Furthermore, the seven burning lamps prefigured the seven works of mercy in Mary (ibid: 97).

The latent and sometimes even explicitly anti-Jewish approach in the Speculum Humanae Salvationis certainly requires critical reflection in its own right. Here there is both continuity and contrast—the former setting Mary and Hannah in close parallel, the latter reinforcing Christianity’s sense of its greater excellence: ‘Anna offered a son who would contend for the Jews. Mary offered a son who was going to protect the world’ (ibid: 99).

References

Nielsen, Melinda. 2022. An Illustrated Speculum Humanae Salvationis. Green Collection MS 000321 with iconographical notes by David Lyle Jeffrey (Leiden: Brill)