Picture 2 / 3
Eastman Johnson, The Lord Is My Shepherd, 1863
A man sits by the hearth and reads the Bible. Johnson painted the picture in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, and gave it the first words of the psalm as its title.
Reading had been forbidden to most enslaved people, and reading is what the picture shows. The book is open near the front; the psalms stand in the middle of a Bible, so the man may be reading Exodus, the story of a people led out of slavery.
He reads bent forward, the book in both hands, by the light of the fire.
