Faith Works: Angels of harvest, death, and victory

Ludwig Bang, as I’ve proposed over the last two weeks here, is a German born artist classically trained in Europe, hired to come complete the decoration of Licking County’s 1876 courthouse in the now famous West Courtroom, intended as the completion of this centerpiece of Newark.

Since a fire shortly after completion ruined the upper portion, we know the detail work now visible in the West Courtroom is dated to after 1880, and there’s reason to believe it was done piecemeal. The Tiffany windows up high went in to start, then the fine plasterwork creating frames and pilasters inside. There’s additional stained glass that’s not Tiffany, and portrait busts to accent the depictions of leading figures from American history in the windows. And then there are the paintings.

This has been debated elsewhere, but I would argue the choice to put William McKinley in one of the roundels along with the martyred Lincoln, and by-that-date deceased Grant, means these paintings (plus the Great Seal above a currently defunct water fountain) were done after his death in the fall of 1901. I think it’s clear the portraits are also by the artist of the two angel paintings behind the judge’s bench. The murals up high I would definitely credit to Bang, and once cleaned and conserved we’re likely to find a signature we can’t see under decades of cigar smoke today.

Then two angel paintings, at the heart of my speculation this Thanksgiving. They’ve been called “The Angel of the Harvest” and “The Angel of Death.”

What I believe the “historienmaler” or history painter Ludwig Bang was after, though, was a bit more subtle. There is a harvest scene, and an angel hovering, in one. A woman is seated with a nursing child to one side; it’s not hard to connect the newborn and the new harvest being gathered in by the figure with a scythe facing away from us.

Taken in isolation, the harvester looks quite like the then famous work by Winslow Homer, “The Veteran in a New Field” of 1865. As was well-known, it showed a man returned from the Civil War, some of his surplus military garb and canteen gently obscured in the foreground. Our harvest scene has a humble earthenware jug in the place where Homer nods to the veteran’s status. The spouse and child and of course angel are additions, but the tribute and meaning in the center of the painting seems quite clear as referring back to the earlier work, in a time when the role of veterans in American politics was changing - McKinley was the last Civil War veteran, as it turns out, to serve as President. **

Hovering over the counterpart painting, where a similarly dressed figure is now carrying a musket and heading into battle, is the image often called “the angel of death.” Its face is obscured, and the robes are shadowed versus the brightly lit harvest angel, though I think cleaning might show them not as dark as we see now.

What I do see is a shape that Bang would have seen, freshly placed in the main staircase of the Louvre when he first visited Paris: the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Like the scythe-bearer in the harvest picture, it’s not a precise copy, but Bang would not have been so obvious.

Yet I think it’s fair to say that while death and battle may be in the shadows, the message of the second angel is beckoning the central figure not towards his doom, but to victory. In this life, as well as the next.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he’s enjoyed getting to know Luden Bang and hopes you’ve found his story interesting as well. Tell him what you see in these paintings at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Faith Works: Angels of harvest, death, and victory