The Lord Is My Shepherd

Title

The Lord Is My Shepherd

Artist

Eric Glaser

Medium

Painting - Oil On Panel

Description

"The Lord Is My Shepherd"

Artist: Eastman Johnson (American, 1824-1906)

Title: The Lord Is My Shepherd

Object Type: Painting

Date: 1863

Medium: Oil on Panel

Dimensions: Height: 422.40 mm (16.62 in); Width: 333.50 mm (13.12 in)

Collection: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. USA

Credit Line: Gift of Mrs. Francis P. Garvan

Jonathan Eastman Johnson was an American painter and co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, with his name inscribed at its entrance. He was best known for his genre paintings, paintings of scenes from everyday life, and his portraits both of everyday people and prominent Americans such as Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His later works often show the influence of the 17th-century Dutch masters, whom he studied in The Hague in the 1850s; he was known as The American Rembrandt in his day.

Eastman Johnson painted The Lord Is My Shepherd only months after the Emancipation Proclamation of New Year’s Day, 1863. The image of a humble black man reading from his Bible was reassuring to white Americans uncertain of what to expect from the freed slaves. But the simple act of reading was itself a political issue. Emancipation meant that blacks must educate themselves in order to be productive, responsible citizens. In the slaveholding South, teaching a black person to read had been a crime; in the North, the issue was not ​“May they read?” but ​“They must read.“

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006

Text Credit: Google Arts & Culture, SAAM

This is a Google Art Project image, thank you Google!

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Additional image editing by Eric Glaser

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August 6th, 2020

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