Behold Thy Son, 1956, Oil on canvas, Smithsonian, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC

Audio Description

Behold thy Son is oil on canvas. It was painted in 1956. The painting is in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

This is a vertical oil painting on canvas called Behold Thy Son. In the background, a woman, with eyes closed, wraps her arms around a disfigured dead body in the foreground. The title suggests this is a mother and her son. The son is painted with his arms outstretched and head tilted back, wearing only a cloth around the waist and upper thighs. The woman behind him has a white cloth draped over her right arm, and there is another figure behind her, looking on. There is a column and a candelabra on the right side, in a room that appears to be a place of worship. The entire painting is made up of thick brushstrokes of brown and white, with some red accents along the son’s right arm. The composition is similar to renditions of the Virgin Mary holding Jesus after his Crucifixion. The son’s disfigured face also refers to the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till at the hands of two white men in Mississippi in 1953.

Label Copy

Behold thy Son is oil on canvas. It was painted in 1956. The painting is in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

Behold Thy Son pays homage to Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy whose brutal murder in Mississippi in 1955 brought national attention to racial violence and racial injustice, especially the South. Driskell’s symbolic rendering brings Till’s death in communion with Jesus’s sacrifice. Painted in dark hues, the central figures, and the nearby sarcophagus and candelabra, instill the painting with the somber but sacred quality of a pietà or a Crucifixion. The painting’s title refers to a biblical account of the Crucifixion (John 19:26): “Woman, behold thy son!” Drawings Driskell completed the same year, Behold Thy Son, I (on view nearby) and Study for Behold Thy Son, expand our understanding of the artist’s approach to this iconic Christian subject.

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