Rembrandt van Rijn's David Playing the Harp Before Saul, usually dated to around 1655-1660 and now in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, is widely regarded as his most penetrating psychological study and one of the greatest paintings in the history of Western art. The canvas depicts King Saul seated at the left, a rich gold and red curtain behind him, one hand pressing the curtain to his face while the other holds a spear. To the right, the young David - his youth emphasized by his small scale relative to the enormous king - plays the harp, his eyes half-closed in concentration, oblivious to the drama of the figure he faces.
The biblical source is 1 Samuel 16:23: 'Whenever the spirit from God came on Saul, David would take up his lyre and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him.' The painting captures a moment of exquisite psychological complexity. Saul's face is wet with tears - he is genuinely moved by the music, genuinely relieved, and this makes the painting's tragedy deeper: the evil spirit that torments him is not simply external possession but something entangled with his own psychology, and the music that relieves him is played by the very person who will replace him, whose presence is itself a source of the anguish the music soothes.
The spear Saul grips in his right hand is the instrument with which he will twice attempt to kill David (1 Samuel 18:10-11: 'the next day an evil spirit from God came forcefully on Saul. He was prophesying in his house, while David was playing the harp, as he usually did. Saul had a spear in his hand and he hurled it, saying to himself, "I'll pin David to the wall."'). Rembrandt depicts the moment before this violence, but the spear in Saul's hand places the painting on the threshold of catastrophe: the king is simultaneously weeping with relief and holding the instrument of murder.
The painting's greatest technical achievement is Saul's face. The wet eye, the trembling lower lip, the curtain pressed against the cheek as if to dry tears or perhaps to hide them - this is Rembrandt's most searching portrait of a soul in crisis. Saul is not simply a villain; he is a figure of tragic grandeur, a king who has lost God's favor (1 Samuel 16:14: 'the Spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul') and knows it, who is being replaced by a better man and knows it, whose relief at the music is inseparable from his awareness that the musician is his doom.
The contrast between the two figures is carefully constructed. David is small, absorbed in his music, bright-faced, self-contained - the figure of divine favor in its natural state. Saul is large, restless, tormented, occupying most of the canvas - the figure of power without divine sustaining. The painting does not condemn Saul; it invites compassion for him. This is characteristic of Rembrandt's biblical paintings generally: he is drawn to the psychology of failure and grace in equal measure, and the David-Saul relationship - with its combination of genuine love, lethal jealousy, and divine reversal - was among the biblical narratives he returned to most often.
The attribution and dating of the Mauritshuis painting have been the subject of scholarly debate. The Rembrandt Research Project, which systematically re-examined the attributions of paintings traditionally assigned to Rembrandt, initially questioned the work's attribution but later reaffirmed it, with a revised dating to around 1655-1660. The canvas has been cut down from a larger original, and some scholars believe the composition originally included additional figures.
The painting was in the collection of Prince William V of Orange-Nassau and passed with the Stadholder's collection into the Mauritshuis when that institution was established in the early nineteenth century. It is displayed in the Mauritshuis alongside Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring and several other Rembrandt works, allowing for direct comparison with the full range of Dutch Golden Age painting.
For further reading: Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (1985); Simon Schama, Rembrandt's Eyes (1999); Walter Liedtke, Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2007); Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (1992); Christian Tümpel, Rembrandt (1993).