03/17/2022
Brookwood Covenant Church is looking for a new home for Sallman’s Head of Christ. It is an original, chalk portrait. Dimensions are 45.5 in X 35.5 in. Measurement includes the frame. Please contact us at [email protected] or 785.273.3770 for more information.
The Head of Christ, is a 1940 portrait of Jesus of Nazareth by American artist Warner Sallman (1892–1968). As an extraordinarily successful work of Christian popular devotional art, it had been reproduced over half a billion times worldwide by the end of the 20th century. Enlarged copies of the work have been made for churches, and small pocket or wallet-sized prayer cards bearing the image have been mass-produced for private devotional use.
It was during World War II that the painting gained international notice. Through the USO, the Salvation Army and YMCA handed out pocket versions of the painting to soldiers as they left to fight in Europe and Asia.
By the mid 1940s, prints of the painting were hanging in every room of several hospitals across the country. Another project, “Christ in Every Purse,” which was endorsed by President Eisenhower and Norman Vincent Peale among others, reproduced millions of cards that were shared worldwide. The painting is said to have "become the basis for [the] visualization of Jesus" for "hundreds of millions" of people. In 1994, The New York Times wrote that Sallman was likely to be voted the "best-known artist of the century".
Sallman was a lifelong member of the Swedish Evangelical Mission Covenant of America (later renamed the Evangelical Covenant Church).
