William King worked on the west wall fresco in 1952, assisted by Philip Bornarth and Michelene Beaumont. The three had been awarded the Margaret Day Blake Fellowship from a jury made of faculty members from the Skowhegan School, which King had attended in 1948, along with René d’Harnoncourt, director of the Museum of Modern Art, and artists Jack Levine and Franklin Watkins (Cummings 46). The mural itself contains eight scenes from Genesis and the Book of Exodus, and explores biblical lore from the creation of the world up to the death of Moses. King, confessed he tried “to put in as many scenes as were compatible with the scale of the wall,” but since “good frescoes must speak a little more clearly than easel paintings, … [he] tried to juggle a little by putting all this in” (qtd. in Cummings 46). King’s handling of the fresco medium is marked by motion and visible brushstrokes, with a distinctive color scheme in which the complementary colors of red and green dominate and tie together the many scenes depicted in the large mural.
Key: 1, The Creation; 2, The Flood; 3, Moses Receiving the Ten Commandments/The Burning Bush; 4, The Golden Calf; 5, The Plagues of Egypt; 6, The Parting of the Red Sea; 7, The Exodus; 8, Moses looking towards the Promised land (also referred to as “the Death of Moses”).
The Creation
“And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.”
(Genesis 1:16)
“And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.”
(Genesis 1:9)
King focused on a very specific, and yet rarely depicted, scene from the book of Genesis; the creation of the Sun and the Moon, the “two great lights” of Genesis 1:16. From the fingertips of a hand cupping the newly formed Sun, lines curve around the orb and blend into the water found in his next scene, the Flood. Alongside the water, mountains emerge from nothingness. The scene is painterly, and the lines that emerges from the fingertips eventually merge into the sea and the land.
Images such as Giovanni di Paolo’s The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise might lead to understand King’s sun as the formless earth mentioned in the same chapter of Genesis—but this is not the case. That this is instead the sun is confirmed by the presence on the right hand side of the top of the composition of a crescent moon that curls into the clouds of the storm brewing before the scene of the Flood. In a photo of King at work on his SSMH fresco, the moon is more clearly visible than in the finished fresco.
The Flood
“And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.”
(Genesis 7:17)
“Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.”
(Genesis 7:20)
In his depiction of the Flood, King chose a specific moment in the scene, with the tips of the mountains yet to be fully covered by the rising waters. This decision might have been motivated by a desire to create a continuous narrative, connecting the Creation and the Flood. King rendered the crashing flood waters and the downpour from the heavens in a painterly style, conveying the motion of the tumultuous waves. The rain pours down from clouds painted at the top of the wall, above a window. Thanks to this clever use of the building’s architecture, the rain in the fresco is echoed in inclement weather by that outside the building, and by the rays of light that stream down on sunny days.
Although Noah’s ark follows the iconographic tradition, King neglected to show the reason for God’s punishment. Unlike Michelangelo Sistine Ceiling fresco (which he probably saw when in Rome as a Fulbright fellow in 1949), King did not include the sinners responsible for God’s wrath.
Moses Receiving the Ten Commandments
“Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law… There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush.”
(Exodus 3:1–2)
“And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice.”
(Exodus 9:29)
“And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.”
(Exodus 34:28)
For his depiction of Moses Receiving the Ten Commandments, King drew inspiration from multiple passages in Exodus in which Moses and God interact directly. In fact, he conflated the scene with that of God appearing to Moses in a burning bush while he tends to his flock of sheep. He chose to place his depiction of God in the center of the wall, right above the pulpit.
The sheep, painted a gold yellow, graze oblivious, while Moses cowers before the Burning Bush, with the tablets of the law directly above him. King represented this Old Testament theophany in a most original and dynamic way. Trumpets and bursts of light emerge from a flaming center, conveying to the viewer the physical and auditory sensations used to describe God in the book of Exodus. Here as well, dynamic brushstrokes convey motion and emotional sensations to the viewers along with the same color scheme of green (the bush) and red (the flames). While the choice to include an image of God or of Jesus above an altar is traditional, King’s decision to include this highly original depiction mirrors the Meeting House’s non-denominational vocation.
The Golden Calf
“When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, ‘Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’”
(Exodus 32:1)
“ [Aaron] had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.”
(Exodus 32:4)
In his depiction of the Golden Calf, King also closely followed the scriptural source. We see the recently freed Israelites, impatient with Moses, who had left to receive the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, demand something to worship in his absence. With their gold jewelry, they built an idol, a golden calf that they placed upon an altar and began to worship. King includes palm trees to set his depiction in the Holy Land, and true to the Bible and to the iconographic tradition, he includes the Israelites dancing and bowing to the golden calf. We see the same elements in Cosimo Roselli’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel—another scene King might have seen during his year in Rome. Interestingly, the picture also includes a continuous narrative in which the scene of Moses Receiving the Ten Commandments is placed next to that of the Israelites worshipping the false idol.
It is worth noting that the scene of the Golden Calf is placed in such a way as to be juxtaposed to King’s representation of God above the pulpit. As a matter of fact, the calf’s legs are placed at the same height as the wooden dado behind the pulpit, creating a meaningful opposition of the two—a true God and an idol.
The Plagues of Egypt
King’s depiction of the Plagues of Egypt is similar to his representation of God in the Ten Commandments/Burning Bush scene. Instead of representing each of the ten plagues separately, King instead combines of several of them. In the cluster that looms over a city, several plagues can be identified: frogs rain from the dark sky, with drops of blood, hail, and fire falling alongside them, while two angels fly nearby. In the book of Exodus, the final plague is the death of the firstborn son. While Israelites are protected through the blood of the lamb placed above their doorways, the firstborn sons of the Egyptians perish. Although not specifically mentioned in the Bible, many depictions of this scene include an angel of death traveling from door to door, and this might be why King included an angel. In this portion of the fresco, the storm that hails over the Egyptian city is directly placed over a window, mirroring the Flood’s storm over the wall’s other window.
The Parting of the Red Sea and the Exodus
“And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.”
(Exodus 14:21–22)
The parting of the Red Sea and the resulting Exodus are painted in King’s distinctive style that appears throughout the wall. The Red Sea, now turned literally red, complements the artist’s portrayal of the Israelites, a green mass of figures moving through the gap in the Red Sea (they move left to right, matching the sense of reading of the scenes on the wall). Unlike earlier depictions of the scene, King neglects to show God’s wrath as he chooses to solely focus on the Israelites, who are spared. Famous depictions of the parting of the Red Sea, such as Cosimo Roselli’s in the Sistine Chapel, include the drowning of the Egyptian army in pursuit of the Israelites.
The Death of Moses
“And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho. And the LORD shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan.”
(Deuteronomy 34:1)
“So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD.”
(Deuteronomy 34:4–5)
King concludes his mural on the far right side of the wall with a depiction of the Death of Moses. The prophet turns his back to us and looks out into the Promise Land. This is a simple scene, but one that displays the artist’s careful reading of the Bible, and perhaps as well his awareness of the iconographic tradition. In this as in the earlier depiction of Moses, the prophet has horns. This motif, quite frequent in art, stems from a mistranslation of the Biblical passage in which Moses returns from Mount Sinai. The Hebrew word, “qeren,” which in this case referred to rays of light, was understood as “horns,” its other meaning (see Mellinkoff).
In the fresco Luca Signorelli and Bartolomeo della Gatta painted for the Sistine Chapel, we see the traditional iconography of Moses, before his death, looking out onto the Promised Land. We can also note the “horns of light” that grace the prophet’s head.
Conclusion
William King “hoped [for his mural] to have a lot of repose and serenity in spite of the subject matter” (qtd. in Cummings 46) and his final scene is peaceful and ethereal. As we have seen, many of King’s images appear to be an attempt at directly translating the text Biblical text into pictures, at times coming up with highly original solutions as he did for the figure of God above the pulpit and often selecting to focus on an optimistic reading of scriptures. Although it is possible that his South Solon work bear witness to the frescoes he would have seen during his time in Rome, his painterly style with characteristic large motion-conveying brushstrokes belongs to his time.
—Carter Dexter
- The Holy Bible: King James Version. Dallas, TX: Brown Books Publishing, 2004.
- Mellinkoff, Ruth. The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970.