Picture in Focus: Miracle in Cana by Earl Stetson Crawford

July 10, 2016

Picture in Focus: Miracle in Cana by Earl Stetson Crawford

This week's new art offering from the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection by an American printmaker is an image of Christ's first miracle at Cana, recalling the 17th century etchings of Dutch Master Rembrandt. It is the work of Earl Stetson Crawford, a onetime student in the Paris academy of Early Modernist James McNeill Whistler who returned to the U.S. and found success in the burgeoning Gilded Age commercial art market. Crawford was drawn back to Europe midway in his career and devoted himself to the study of masterworks by European graphic artists, developing a traditional style of etching that relied on detailed preliminary sketches. It remained unchanged into the Modernist era. This new print of Christ turning water into wine, a narrative found in John 2:1-12, joins other biblical etchings in the gallery of Crawford's profile page in the Sacred Artists section. (John Kohan)