Head of Christ

This very rare and distinctive work is the only known oil portrait of Jesus to have been painted by a late nineteenth-century American artist. William Page, an accomplished portraitist who also produced literary and history paintings inspired by the art of the Venetian Renaissance, was known as the “American Titian.” Initially a student of Protestant theology, he also trained with the painter and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse. While traveling in Italy, Page was introduced by the neoclassical sculptor Hiram Powers to the Swedenborgian faith, a belief system that located the divine in nature. Commissioned and owned for most of its history by fellow Swedenborgian Theodore Tilton—a leading editor, poet, and ardent abolitionist—the work created a controversy when it was first publicly displayed in New York, in 1871. Page’s efforts to humanize the divine by depicting Jesus’s ‘physical beauty’ was misunderstood by viewers, who criticized the sensuous nature of the portrayal. The elaborate tabernacle-style frame and shadow box—designed and inscribed by the artist to emphasize the foundational Christian idea of ‘flesh into spirit’—is original to the work.