Light of the Incarnation (Lux Incarnationis)

Carl Gutherz, a Swiss-born American artist, was among the small group of Tennessee artists who took up residence in Paris in the last quarter of the 19th century. Leaving Memphis in 1870, he received his initial training at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Upon his return to the United States, he became an art instructor in St. Louis from 1875 to 1884, helping to establish the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts. During his second tenure in Paris, from 1884 to 1896, he attended the Académie Julian under French masters Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. His work took on a new direction and inspiration as he combined his Christian beliefs with Symbolist imagery and ideology, producing some of his finest large-scale salon paintings. Returning to the United States in 1896 to work on a set of murals for the Library of Congress, Gutherz and his family settled in Washington, D.C., where he remained until his death in 1907.

Light of the Incarnation, which received a bronze medal in the1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, was Gutherz’s most successful and widely exhibited painting. It is one of a number of canvases where he explored the link between the spiritual world and earthly existence, between the real and the ideal. It reflects the 19th-century Symbolist aesthetic that put an emphasis upon imagination, intuition, and the senses, and also explored the realms of divinity and the supernatural.

Here, the birth of Christ is seen from the perspective of the angels above, as the “heavenly Host unites in rejoicing” and “light glows back from earth to heaven.”1 From the lofty clouds, an angel with outstretched arms beckons us to witness this miraculous event. Gutherz chose opalescent colors to paint this immense ethereal scene, using flowers, birds, and butterflies as symbols of purity and rebirth. The elegantly posed and draped figures owe much to his admiration for Raphael, while the halos in gilt relief, which lend a decorative element to the surface, recall the work of Renaissance artists such as Fra Angelico.

1. Carl Gutherz, Green Journal (unpublished notebook), Collection of Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, p. 122.