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The Lord Is My Shepherd
Eastman Johnson (born Lovell, ME 1824-died New York City 1906)
1863
- Medium
- oil on fiberboard
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 16 5/8 x 13 1/8 in. (42.3 x 33.2 cm.)
- Culture
- Christians
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Francis P. Garvan, Transfer from the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
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
