As we approach the season of Advent, a time when Christians await the coming of Christ, I'm concluding my series on images of prophets in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection with a trio of portraits of John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus. John is presented in the Gospels as the fulfillment of the prophecy in Isaiah 40:30 about "the voice crying in the wilderness," preparing the way of the Lord. Christ paid John the highest of tributes, saying that "among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet (Luke 7:28, KJV)." We see this fiery speaker-of-truth-to-power, who lived in the desert eating locusts and wild honey, calling sinners to repentence in this chromolithograph in high Art Deco style from Belgian Artist Jos Speybrouck. The Latin inscription quotes the Baptizer, who saw his rite of baptism by water as a foreshadowing of the baptism in the Holy Spirit that would come with Christ. The print belongs to a cycle of mass-market posters of the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, which Speybrouck created between 1923 and 1940 for the Benedictine Order at the Abbaye-de-St.-Andre near Bruges. (John Kohan)