VIDEO: Everyone Has This Portrait of Jesus in Their Home, but the Story Behind it…

Almost all Americans have the same portrayal of Jesus in their homes, the one we are talking about is known as the “Head of Christ”. This one shows the head of Jesus from the side on a brown background and it has been copied in many forms through time.
The original portrait was done by Warner Sallman and the most interesting fact about is that the painter was on a deadline when he fell asleep and had a vision of Jesus Christ himself.

Here is some further information on the painting, provided by Wikipedia.

The Head of Christ, also called the Sallman Head, is a 1940 portrait painting 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. The painting is said to have “become the basis for [the] visualization of Jesus” for “hundreds of millions” of people.

The Head of Christ originated as a charcoal sketch entitled The Son of Man done in 1924 and sold to be the cover of the Covenant Companion, the denominational magazine for the Evangelical Covenant Church. Sallman did several variations of the painting over the years, and the first oil version was done in 1935 for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Evangelical Covenant Church. In 1940, he was asked to reproduce that painting by the students of North Park Theological Seminary. This reproduction was seen by representatives of the Gospel Trumpet Company, the publishing arm of the Church of God (Anderson), who created a new company called Kriebel and Bates to market Sallman’s work. For the next thirty years, Kriebel and Bates marketed over 100 Warner Sallman works.

The Baptist Bookstore initially popularized the painting, distributing various sized lithographic images for sale throughout the southern United States. The Salvation Army and the YMCA, as members of the USO, handed out pocket-sized versions of the painting to American servicemen heading overseas during World War II. After the war, groups in Oklahoma and Indiana conducted campaigns to distribute the image into private and public spaces. One Lutheran organizer in Illinois “said that there ought to be ‘card-carrying Christians’ to counter the effect of ‘card-carrying Communists.”

Many Lutheran and Roman Catholic Christians have praised the painting for the hidden host on the forehead of The Head of Christ, and a chalice on His temple, both pointing to the Holy Eucharist. Similarly, the Head of Christ became popular among evangelical Christians as well, as they believed the portrait to emphasize the “salvific power of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus”. David Morgan, a professor of religion at Duke University, states that “for many Christians during the Cold War, Sallman’s portrait did symbolize a virile, manly Christ, while for others it embodied a more intimate and nurturing Jesus, a personal saviour for modern times.”

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