David the King

Our ideas about David are to a certain extent conventional. Everybody has made for himself a picture of the Psalmist king, and has put into it some of his own prejudices and personality. We have French Davids, English and German ones, Davids who believe and Davids without faith, Jewish Davids, Davids Catholic and Protestant, Davids of the eighteenth and of the nineteenth centuries, all deviating from the original in a marked degree, each placed against a background in accordance with the accustomed surroundings of the painter. My wish has been to reinstate the hero of the Biblical epic in his own times and environment, or at least to make the attempt.