Details

Title

Take My Yoke Upon You and Learn of Me Saith Jesus, #1,060

Artist/Maker

Howard Finster (American, 1916–2001)

Date

1977–1978

Medium

Paint on board

Dimensions

17 1/2 × 48 3/8 × 1 1/8 inches (44.5 cm × 122.9 cm × 2.9 cm)

Credit

High Museum of Art, Atlanta; T. Marshall Hahn Collection, 1997.74

Accession #

1997.74

Location

Currently not on view

In this early painting, Finster provides the viewer with a complete painted sermon on the difficulties of giving up worldly things to follow Jesus, including a warning about the consequences of partial commitment: while the plowman, having already “laid his hand to the plow,” looks longingly back at a little brown jug, his oxen trample the cornfield. Finster’s experience taught him that his painted lessons stuck in the mind longer than his spoken sermons ever had: “the people not gonna forget it from one service to another. And that’s why I’m in folk art.”

Image Copyright

© Howard Finster/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York