Gilbert J. De Mille
30 July 1916 - 13 May 1993

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In his image

A 20th Century Religious Icon Had Its Genesis In A Cherubic Rogers Park Boy

July 15, 2001|By Patrick T. Reardon.

For millions of American Catholics, a painting known as "Light of the World," an image of Jesus as a small boy, recalls a long-gone era of nuns in thick habits, incense-filled sanctuaries and the Baltimore Catechism. Indeed, during the first half of the 20th Century, it was the most popular religious print in America.

Now, after decades of obscurity, the image is making a modest comeback--on the Internet, of all places. Go to the eBay auction Web site and, most days, you'll find several copies of the print, dragged up from basements or found amid a deceased relative's belongings, and offered for sale not so much as religious objects but as "collectibles."

Some buyers want them for their antique frames, while others consider the images investments that may rise in value. Many bid out of nostalgia, hoping to regain a piece of their childhood and the innocence of their early religious belief.

Darlene Baker has a different reason: She has 90 copies of the print hanging on three walls of her living room in Winnetka because, for her, the image isn't just Jesus. It's also her father.

Eighty-one years ago, her father, Gilbert DeMille, then a boy of 4, posed for artist Charles Bosseron Chambers for a painting of Jesus and St. Joseph in the newly built St. Ignatius Church in Rogers Park. It was a detail of that painting, the face of Jesus--the face of Gilbert--that became "Light of the World." Between 1920 and 1940, millions of copies of the bare-shouldered, curly-haired, blond Jesus were sold, reflecting a wistful devoutness, a sweet piety, that was a hallmark of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, and of American Christianity in general.

In that era, "Light of the World" was often found in Catholic schools, churches and rectories. In fact, midway through the 1948 movie "The Miracle of the Bells," the print can be seen above the desk of a priest consulted by Bill Dunnigan (Fred MacMurray). Many a Catholic home also had copies of the image, often hanging over the beds of children.

One of those beds was Darlene Baker's. "It was Daddy, but it was Jesus, but it was Daddy," she says.

It seems somewhat odd, but, for Baker and her three sisters, having a picture of Daddy-Jesus was just part of the landscape at home, no more unreal than their parents' old wedding photos. Well, maybe a little bit more unreal, acknowledges Baker, now 53. "He looked so much like an angel, and my dark-haired, double-chinned dad bore even less resemblance to that boy beneath the halo than he did to the guy in the wedding tux."

DeMille, who died in 1993, was proud of having posed as the child Jesus, but also a bit embarrassed. "He wasn't too happy about having to take his clothes off," his widow, Eleanor, recalls.

His parents were Belgian immigrants. His father, Victor, was custodian at the St. Ignatius parish school. His mother, Alida, took care of Gilbert and his older brother Vic in a two-bedroom apartment that was part of the school. She also ran a penny-candy store on the first floor.

As a toddler and young boy, Gilbert had the run of the school building. "He was the nuns' pet," Eleanor says. So, when Chambers came to St. Ignatius to paint side altars for the church, one of the sisters suggested Gilbert as a model.

Looking at the painting today, it's easy to see why 4-year-old Gilbert might have found posing uncomfortable. In the arms of St. Joseph, Jesus is naked except for a small piece of cloth loosely draped across his middle. It wouldn't have been surprising if Gilbert had squirmed around a lot in irritation or protest.

For whatever reason, Chambers finished the painting using another boy's body--a German boy, according to one source; an Italian one, according to another--while retaining DeMille's face.

In a 1941 interview with Liberty magazine, Chambers said that, after he finished the painting of St. Joseph and the child Jesus, he returned to New York. "But the face of that child haunted me. I had to paint it. I had to paint it for its own sake," he said. The result was "Light of the World," the image that made Chambers' reputation as an artist of religious subjects.

It also gave DeMille a smidgen of status at St. Ignatius--but just a smidgen. "All of us knew he was the one," says Sister Anna Marie Erst, a childhood friend. "We just took it for granted. He looked like the Holy Child. If somebody was visiting the church, you'd say, 'Oh, there's Victor's son up there.' "

After attending nearby Loyola University, DeMille won a scholarship to Harvard Business School but dropped out a year later. Back in Chicago, DeMille got his first job as an accountant, a career he followed for four decades. He and Eleanor married in 1942 and moved to the Jefferson Park neighborhood on the Northwest Side.

The easygoing DeMille was the quintessential mid-century American Catholic layman. At St. Cornelius, his new parish, he was an usher, song leader and lector. He also served as president of the Holy Name Society and was a Grand Knight in the Knights of Columbus.

"We bowled together. We went on retreat together. I played golf with him," says Chester Schwarz, a friend of half a century. "He was a normal kind of a guy. He wasn't one who would tell you that you were this or that, or go preaching."

For many years, the only copy of "Light of the World" in the DeMille home was the one over Darlene's bed. And, although Eleanor often gave the print as a First Communion or Confirmation gift, DeMille didn't tell many people at his new parish about posing as Jesus. But close friends knew. And the DeMille girls used to jokingly refer to themselves as "the daughters of the Christ child."

Meanwhile, on the basis of "Light of the World" and similar works, Chambers was gaining renown. One magazine characterized him as the "Painter of Heaven." And, in 1956, Parade magazine included "Light of the World" along with works by Botticelli and Raphael in a list of what it said were the five most beautiful images of the child Jesus ever produced.

That was rarefied company for Chambers, to be sure. But much of his popularity had to do with how unlike the works of the masters--and his contemporaries--his images were.

"He's the artist who threw a bucket of paint into the religious art world," wrote Edward Doherty in Liberty magazine in 1941. "He's a rebel. He's a modern. He's the man who revolutionized the whole business. . . . He's given his work a modern touch, a distinctly American touch . . . but the roar that went up from the church crowd, you'd think the poor fellow had committed a sacrilege!" Art experts dismissed his work as insipid and saccharine.

Chambers, a Catholic born in St. Louis in 1883, had studied in Berlin, Dresden, Vienna and Italy before settling in Manhattan with his wife, Anne, the niece of Archbishop Patrick Freehan of Chicago. He painted and drew secular subjects, including the swashbuckling illustrations for a 1935 edition of Sir Walter Scott's novel "Quentin Durward," a series of ads featuring flapper-type women for Mum's deodorant and a 1926 oil of a nude Mercury.

His religious art had much in common with those works. The images were immediate, unambiguous, prettified. Whereas great artists of the past had created religious compositions of intricate complexity, Chambers opted almost always for a single, static, portrait-like pose. At a time when painters such as Jackson Pollock and Pablo Picasso were bending and twisting visual tradition, or ignoring it altogether, Chambers presented images of Jesus and the saints that looked very much like 1920s movie stars in costume.

The work, says David Morgan, an art professor at Valparaiso University and author of "Visual Piety" (University of California Press), appealed to women, and it appealed to an ethos of innocence, a child-centered piety."

Religious educators of the time stressed the usefulness of art in transmitting religious messages, Morgan says. "You wanted the image to exert a moralizing influence," he says. And, referring to "Light of the World," Morgan adds, "This is the sweet little guy you can't ignore."

Indeed, these images often were displayed as though they were spiritual members of the household. "People would arrange photos of the family around a picture of Jesus or Mary," Morgan notes.

Nonetheless, by 1964, when Chambers died at age 81, his work had suffered a sharp drop in popularity. The Second Vatican Council, with its emphasis on a more grass-roots spirituality, as well as social shifts throughout much of American society, led to an interest in more realistically portrayed saints, warts and all. Later came the still-raging fad for pictures of angels.

Today, of course, the re-imagining of how Jesus appeared has gone so far that the British Broadcasting Corp. recently made public a computer-generated image, based on scientific and archeological findings about the physiognomy of a typical Jewish male of the era. Not surprisingly, the image looks nothing like "Light of the World." Indeed, the face of the swarthy, large-nosed, curly-haired man has unsettled some Christians raised on images like the one from Chambers.

But Baker's mother, Eleanor DeMille, says she has always been a little unsettled about the image of her husband as the infant Jesus. "I don't think of Jesus as blond," she says. "I think of him as dark, maybe very dark."

Ten years after Chambers' death, "Light of the World" had become a figure of kitsch, appearing, along with a child's ukulele, on an inner-sleeve photograph of singer Linda Ronstadt for her album "Heart Like a Wheel."

And it was a decade after that, in the mid-1980s, when Baker and her sisters began discovering copies of the print at rummage sales and flea markets. "I was just astonished to find my dad being sold like an antique," says Baker, who first came across a copy of the painting of St. Joseph and Jesus in a garage during a Lincoln Park antiques fair. She bought the print and gave it to her parents.

"After that, any time I'd go to a rummage sale, I'd look to see if they had Dad. I bought maybe 10 of them, and mostly I was giving them away to my sisters and my nieces and nephews. For the longest time, after I negotiated my price, I'd tell them it was my dad, and I would get chills. It was like a very spiritual feeling."

Then, in October 1999, Darlene found copies of "Light of the World" on eBay for as little as $2. So she began bidding on as many as she could. And, while some cost as much as $75, she figures she has spent an average of $30 each for the 90 copies of "Light of the World" and 30 other Chambers prints she has bought.

She has traded e-mails with other fans of "Light of the World" and of Chambers' work in general, including Mary Popp, head of the Society for the Preservation of Roman Catholic Heritage, based in Dayton, Ohio.

"When Vatican II came along, so much that was beautiful was pitched," says Popp, whose organization seeks to save old religious artifacts from the landfill. Popp, who owns more than 50 Chambers prints, has reprinted several and sells them to raise money for the group.

Baker says she'd also like to start selling off some of her prints, perhaps to raise money for services to victims of Alzheimer's disease. "What I'll keep are the best ones and the worst ones," she says.

Standing in front of a wall covered with dozens of copies of the print, Baker acknowledges, "It is over the top. This is my first and last collection. It has a life of its own."

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Gilbert J. De Mille
Illinois, Cook County Deaths, 1878-1994

Event Type Death
Event Date 13 May 1993
Event Place Chicago, Cook, Illinois
Residence Place 5329 N Ludlam

Name Gilbert J De Mille
Gender Male
Age 76
Marital Status Married
Race White
Occupation Comptroller
Birth Date 30 Jul 1916
Birthplace Chicago, , Illinois

Funeral Home Colonial-Wojciechowski Funeral Home
Burial Date 17 May 1993
Burial Place Niles, Cook, Illinois
Cemetery Maryhill

Father's Name Victor De Milliano
Mother's Name Alida Syoen
Spouse's Name Eleanor Smessaert
Spouse's Gender Female
Informant's Name Eleanor De Mille

Entry Number 609125

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Citing this Record

"Illinois, Cook County Deaths, 1878-1994," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q234-MXPR), Gilbert J De Mille, 13 May 1993; citing Chicago, Cook, Illinois, United States, source reference, record number, Cook County Courthouse, Chicago; FHL microfilm.

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Full Name Record Type File Number Event Date
DE MILLE, GILBERT J Death 6009125 5/13/1993

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Eleanor S Demille
United States Social Security Death Index

Given Name Eleanor
Middle Name S
Surname Demille
Birth Date 15 Aug 1917
State Illinois
Last Place of Residence Cook, Illinois
Previous Residence Postal Code 60631
Event Date 04 May 2010

No image available

Citing this Record

"United States Social Security Death Index," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:VS4W-GQS), Eleanor S Demille, 04 May 2010; citing U.S. Social Security Administration, Death Master File, database (Alexandria, Virginia: National Technical Information Service, ongoing).

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