The parable of the good Samaritan is one of the famous edifying stories presented in the Gospel. According to legend, one Jew went from Jerusalem to Jericho. Robbers attacked him on the way, beat him and took off his clothes. A priest and a Jew Levite passed by the wounded man, and neither of them even tried to help. The Samaritan, on the contrary, stopped, washed the wounds of the victim, put him on his donkey, took him to the hotel and rented lodgings for the traveller with his own money.

The icon from the collection of the Rybinsk Museum Reserve was created in the last quarter of the 18th century in the town of Mologa, which was in close proximity to Rybinsk. Masters painted six baroque icons for the local Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The names of the icon painters were not preserved. Their works were somewhat different in painting style and palette: some icons remind Western European painting with three-dimensional figures and one-point perspective, others are based on the principles of ancient Russian art and have only individual baroque features – a bright palette and decorativeness. The Parable of the Good Samaritan belongs to the second group. 

The icons, including the Parable of the Good Samaritan, were painted on panels of a horizontal format. They were installed in a single narrow tier of the iconostasis, probably in one of the lower ones where they usually placed scenes from the Gospel parables. The images from the Exaltation of the Holy Cross Church have one more peculiarity — they are painted without polya (raised flat borders of the icon panel).

Before the revolution, the icon was kept in the Mologa church, and after – in the Mologa Museum of Local Lore. When the Rybinsk Reservoir was being designed, Mologa turned out to be in the future water area of ​​the new reservoir. Therefore, in 1936, before the construction of the dam, the collection was transferred to the Rybinsk Museum.