Text

A bronze pebble one metre high. Smiling, the little naked fellow looks at the bird on his hand. The feathered friend is just spreading its wings to fly away. David' was made by Lancelot Samson in 1979. The title suggests that it concerns the biblical David, who overcame the giant Goliath with a stone from his sling. So perhaps he is depicted here as a child, uninhibited and innocent. Or did the born portraitist Samson simply immortalise one of his children in bronze?

As a fourteen-year-old studio cleaner, Samson started working with the influential Flemish sculptor Albert Termote (1887-1978). Even then he was already making portraits. His father once said to him: 'Never forget the classical tradition when making a portrait in bronze'. He listened carefully to his father. Just think of Donatello's (1386-1466) 'David' (1430-32), who, like Samson's David, looks down at an angle. It is that tradition of anatomical perfection and the depiction of that one intense moment that Samson builds upon. In Het Financieele Dagblad of 6 July 1994, Samson put into words what it is like to portray people: "You walk through a landscape you have never been to before. But then you see one of those foreheads and a feeling of happiness and beauty runs through you and you struggle with the uncertainty of how to express it. The boundary between the inside and the outside must disappear [...].

That Samson succeeds in breaking that boundary is proven by his powerful portrait busts of well-known Dutchmen such as Willem Duisenberg, Bettine Vriesekoop and Harry Mulisch. The latter he presented with a golden laurel wreath. And then there is that other Samson, who expresses himself in abstract forms, as he has done since the sixties. While his naturalistic heads are in keeping with a tradition, in his free sculptures he searches for possibilities of renewal.