06 September 2023

Grace


This is the "state photograph" for the state of Minnesota.  I've seen it in so many places, including a home I visited a couple weeks ago, so I decided to look it up.  The photo has an interesting story in Wikipedia:
The original photograph was taken at [Eric] Enstrom's photography studio in Bovey, Minnesota. Most sources indicate 1918 as the year... The man depicted in the photograph is Charles Wilden, who earned a meager living as a peddler and lived in a sod house. While the photograph conveys a sense of piety to many viewers, according to the Enstrom family's story, the book seen in the photo is actually a dictionary. However Wilden wrote "Bible" on the waiver of rights to the photo which he signed in exchange for payment, giving credence to the idea that, even if the actual prop used was a dictionary, it was a proxy representing a bible in the photograph. Likewise, local stories about Wilden "centered more around drinking and not accomplishing very much", than religious observation.
The concept of saying a brief prayer before a meal spans many religions; the term "grace" comes from the Ecclesiastical Latin phrase gratiarum actio, "act of thanks."   Wikipedia offers examples of table grace prayers from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Bahai, Hinduism, and Buddhism.  Here is a depiction of grace in a seventeenth-century Dutch painting:


Addendum:  A tip of the blogging cap to reader Jeffo, who found this explanatory video about the photograph embedded above:


Addendum:  I'll add one anecdote about a grace-related event that occurred in my extended family.  One of my cousins adopted a Russian orphan, who arrived in this country as a toddler needing to learn both the language and the customs of her new home.  One evening the family turned to her at the dinner table and asked "Vika, would you please say grace before dinner tonight?"  The little girl thought a moment, folded her hands and said "Dear God, thank you for... soup.  Thank you for... grandfather... Bon appetit!"  The response around the dinner table was one of merriment, followed by a quick reassurance to Vika that there was nothing "wrong" with that grace - it was just one they hadn't heard before.  And to this day (30 years later) when you have dinner with the now widely dispersed members of that family, some table graces may be appended with "Bon appetit" and a retelling of that treasured tale.

3 comments:

  1. This is a good video on the painting's origins and cultural impact:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywpRvxFGnDc

    I shared it with my mother -- true to form, her parents had a colorized copy of the painting on the wall of their Minneapolis home their entire adult lives.

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  2. I grew up with this painting in my parents' house as well, but it was accompanied by a second painting called Gratitude. Gratitude is an elderly woman in a similar pose (but a reflection of the man: the woman is on the left side of the painting facing right, with bread and cheese in front of her, the Bible is open and the folded glasses are on the open book). Thanks for posting the backstory on Grace--it is very interesting! I'm going to poke around a bit and see if there is any info on the counterpart painting.

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  3. My grandmother on my father's side had a copy of this painting in her little apartment. My mother called it, "Jesus Christ, soup again?"

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