As Catholics, we believe in the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. That makes us different from the contemporary culture, as its arbiters of taste are very resistant to those three ideals, and tend instead to find their aesthetics around notions of power, relations, and emotion.

But those of us who believe in eternal life believe there are things, like diamonds, which are incorruptible and last forever. The Mother of God would be one of those, and we believe that in Heaven she, and those of us saved, will have moments of pure delight, of which this painting is one of those moments.

It is beautiful. Antoine Auguste Ernest Hébert (1817 – 1908) was a servant of beauty, and he produced many beautiful paintings in his life. Many of them are of the Blessed Mother, as well as church paintings, and he even has his own museum in Paris, the Musée Hébert, where many of his paintings are or will be displayed. He is called an academic painter, which is that very tight, precise style of French academic painters of the mid-1800s. We don't have a date of this picture, but it's a lot looser than most of his other work, so we assume it was done maybe in the 1880s, with that touch of soft Impressionism working in

** IMPORTANT ** THE IMAGE IS SMALLER THAN THE PAPER! There is a white border of about 0.5" inch for 5x7", 1.3" for 8.5x11", or 1.6" for 11x14" pictures. All Approx! Fine art printers do this because the images are almost never the same rectangular ratio of the standard paper sizes. It also gives the prints a finished look, and lets them look good in a frame without a matt.

– Acid-free fine art paper.
– Archival pigments, rated to last for generations.
– Cardboard backer
– Above story of the art
– Enclosed in a tight-fitting, crystal clear bag.

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Also, check out our Catholic Quote shop, where we are pairing authentic quotes from Saints with Art: www.Etsy.com/shop/CatholicQuote

Thanks for your interest!
Sue & John

“In order to communicate the message entrusted to her by Christ, the Church needs art.” ~ St. Pope John Paul II

Original image is out-of-copyright. Descriptive text and image alterations (hence the whole new image) © by Sue Kouma Johnson – Classic Catholic Art.