All creatures great and small
A couple of years back, my mother gave me a framed copy of what appears to be a Margaret Tarrant painting. I’m not sure what it’s called or when it was produced. The work features baby Jesus and two angels visiting children and animals in the forest. A banner lining the top and bottom quotes from an 1848 hymn by Cecil Frances Alexander:
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.
The print is in pretty bad shape, despite being framed. This copy hung in the childhood rooms of my mother’s older siblings, then her room, then my room, and then my sister’s room. Mom apologized for the ahistorically white depiction of Jesus. In my ignorance, I’d assumed this central figure was some kind of cherub.
Tarrant was an English illustrator, who lived from 1888 to 1959. She specialized in religious subjects, among other things. Tarrant seems to have achieved a great deal of popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Medici Society reproduced her work in the form of books, posters and greeting cards.
My maternal grandparents started their family in the late 1940s. So the timeline doesn’t line up perfectly, but it’s close. They likely purchased the print a little after the height of Tarrant’s career and it’s been with us ever since. For this reason, I have a certain degree of affection for the piece.
As an animal activist, I also like how it suggests some amount of interspecies equality and peace as a Christian ideal. The children watch Jesus alongside animals we frequently regard as food, pests, or nonentities: deer, rabbits, sheep, squirrels, birds, insects and others.
Consciously or not, Tarrant has created a scene reminiscent of the Peaceable Kingdom, described in the Book of Isaiah, in which predator and prey live together without fear. Similarly, one of the angels carries a platter of vegan food, the diet prescribed in the Garden of Eden.
Alexander, who lived from 1818 to 1819, was an Anglo-Irish poet. The refrain of All Things Bright and Beautiful, which Tarrant quotes, posits a divine origin shared by humans and animals. I suppose this doesn’t necessarily imply the latter are deserving of better treatment, but I like to think it does.
Particularly when Tarrant’s images and Alexander’s words are combined, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say the piece suggests compassion toward animals is a Christian obligation. Of course, compassion is a vague term. However, suggesting humans have any direct obligations to animals is a contested claim in Christian history.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, didn’t believe animals were proper objects of moral concern, according to philosopher Bernard Rollin. The theologian disapproved of excessive cruelty to our fellow creatures only because he believed those who were violent towards animals would eventually be violent toward humans.
Given this context, I find Tarrant’s painting to be somewhat progressive, in a limited way. The blond-haired Jesus is another story!