“Daniel’s Answer to the King,” engraving by Joseph Bishop Pratt, 0.2310
Mary Baker Eddy’s Pleasant View and Chestnut Hill homes were filled with artwork, and pieces with a spiritual message were her favorites. She was thrilled when her student Julia Field-King sent her an engraving by Joseph Bishop Pratt of Briton Riviere’s famed painting “Daniel’s Answer to the King.”
Eddy loved the Bible story of Daniel in the lion’s den and drew great strength from Daniel’s faith in God to deliver him. She penned her gratitude to Field-King: “I thank you, a million times I thank you for that wonderful picture.”1 A month later Eddy used the painting to offer encouragement to another student: “Do not be disheartened or in the least down cast. God, the God of Daniel, is able to deliver thee. Come into my library and look at that picture if at any time you feel like it. I often stand before it praying to the same God for grace to help me and all the sufferers and sinners of Adam’s race.”2
Eddy also shared the painting with members of her household and explained how she felt that it connected to her own theology. Emma Easton Newman wrote in her reminiscence, “It was just at this time that she had received the picture of ‘Daniel’s answer to the King’ and she invited us into the library and asked us to sit down while she ‘talked it to us.’ She pointed out that Daniel had turned his back to the lions and was giving his answer to the king. She said, ‘He has turned his back to the lower or bestial elements of mortal mind and is giving his answer to the king, to the highest, and that is what I have always done.’”3
As you can see below, “Daniel’s Answer to the King” hung in the library at Pleasant View (left), but once Eddy moved to her home in Chestnut Hill, it was placed in her bedroom, on the wall opposite her bed (right). Pratt’s engraving of Riviere’s other Daniel painting, “Daniel in the Lions’ Den,” an image depicting Daniel facing the lions, also hung in Eddy’s Pleasant View home in the room of her secretary Irving Tomlinson.