Painter of the Bible
Del Parson
Del Parson is an American religious painter whose images of Jesus Christ are among the most widely reproduced devotional pictures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Life & work
Del Parson is an American religious painter whose images of Jesus Christ are among the most widely reproduced devotional pictures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Born in 1948 in Rexburg, Idaho, raised in a Latter-day Saint family, and trained at Brigham Young University and at Utah State University (where he completed an MFA in 1972), he taught at Dixie State University in St. George, Utah, for more than three decades while building a parallel career as a professional religious portraitist. He continues to paint from his St. George studio.
His best-known image, Christ in a Red Robe (sometimes called Portrait of Christ), painted in the early 1980s, has been reproduced in millions of copies — distributed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, hung in Latter-day Saint meetinghouses and homes worldwide, reproduced in Sunday-school manuals, Christmas cards, and missionary materials, and recognized far beyond Latter-day Saint circles as one of the most familiar twentieth-century portraits of Jesus. The closely related portraits of the head of Christ, of Christ knocking at the door, of Christ in Gethsemane, and the children-with-Christ images that he produced through the 1990s and 2000s have entered the same widely-distributed devotional category.
His broader body of work covers Latter-day Saint historical subjects (the Restoration narratives, scenes from the lives of Joseph Smith and the early Latter-day Saint apostles), Western American landscapes and frontier subjects, and figure painting in a representational, lightly idealized academic manner descended from late-nineteenth-century European devotional realism. His paintings have been commissioned for the Church History Museum in Salt Lake City, for several Latter-day Saint temples, and for private patrons across the western United States.
His significance for SEO and modern Christian art research lies in the unusual scale of his reach: among contemporary American devotional painters working in a representational manner, his portraits of Christ are visible in more homes and meetinghouses than almost any other living artist's. His work is generally categorized as devotional rather than academic — produced for religious use rather than for the gallery system — and is collected and discussed in that context.
Notable works in detail
Jesus the Christ (often known by the title Christ in a Red Robe or simply Portrait of Christ) is among the most reproduced devotional images by any twentieth-century American religious painter. Painted by Del Parson in the early 1980s, the painting depicts Christ in three-quarter view against a soft luminous ground — a calm, soft-bearded, gentle-faced figure with brown hair falling past the shoulders, dressed in a deep crimson robe under a soft white inner garment. Distributed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Sunday-school manuals, missionary materials, devotional booklets, and chapel prints from the 1980s onward, the image has been reproduced in millions of copies across the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking Latter-day Saint world and is widely recognized far beyond Latter-day Saint circles as one of the most familiar twentieth-century portraits of Jesus.
Jesus at the Door (Jesus Knocking at the Door)
Jesus at the Door (also called Jesus Knocking at the Door), painted by Del Parson in the late twentieth century in oil on canvas and reproduced widely through the devotional publishing network of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, depicts the iconographic image of Christ as the figure described in Revelation 3:20 — Behold, I stand at the door, and knock. Parson shows Christ standing on a small stone step before a closed wooden door, his hand raised to knock, a soft inner light around the figure illuminating the otherwise dark approach. The composition follows the Holman Hunt Light of the World tradition of the late nineteenth century but is rendered in Parson's characteristic late-twentieth-century soft-academic style. The painting is among the most reproduced of his religious works in Latter-day Saint devotional materials.
The Good Samaritan, painted by Del Parson in the late twentieth century in oil on canvas and distributed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Sunday-school manuals and devotional materials, depicts the climactic scene of the parable from Luke 10. Parson stages the scene at the side of the road from Jerusalem to Jericho: the wounded man lies on the dusty ground in the foreground, the Samaritan kneels beside him in the act of binding the wounds with cloth from his own pack, while in the deep background the priest and the Levite who had passed by on the other side are still visible as small figures continuing their journey. The composition follows Parson's characteristic combination of warm chromatic palette and clear narrative organization that has made his parable illustrations a standard feature of late-twentieth-century Latter-day Saint Sunday-school materials.
Christ Healing a Blind Man, painted by Del Parson in the late twentieth century in oil on canvas and distributed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Sunday-school manuals and devotional materials, depicts the moment from John 9 in which Christ restores sight to the man born blind. Parson stages the scene as a tender outdoor encounter: the seated blind man on the right with his hands raised toward the kneeling Christ on the left who reaches gently to apply the moistened clay to the man's eyes, with a small group of curious onlookers gathered around them in the background. The composition is one of the standard Parson Gospel-narrative illustrations used in Latter-day Saint Sunday-school curricula across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Mary and Martha, painted by Del Parson in the late twentieth century in oil on canvas and distributed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Sunday-school manuals and devotional materials, depicts the moment from Luke 10 in which Christ visits the home of the two sisters and gently corrects the busy, complaining Martha by commending the listening Mary who has chosen the better part. Parson stages the scene in the small interior of a first-century Judean home: Christ seated on the right with Mary at his feet listening intently, while Martha approaches from the left from the kitchen door with a tray and a careworn expression, in the act of voicing her complaint. The composition is among the standard Parson Gospel-narrative illustrations in Latter-day Saint Sunday-school curricula.
Bible scenes Del Parson painted
Genesis
Luke
John
Isaiah
Matthew
Daniel
Revelation