Paint My Servitude to God: Juliet Thompson and the Portrait
Juliet Thompson, The Diary of Juliet Thompson, (1947), Kalimát Press
When in Bahá'í history
New York (today: New York City, USA)
Juliet Thompson was a young American painter — beautiful, disciplined, and a Bahá’í of recent but unshakeable conviction. By June of 1912 she had been in the daily company of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá since His arrival in New York that April, and she had begun to wonder whether her particular gift might somehow be allowed to serve Him.
The opportunity came in a passing instant. The Diary records a walk one afternoon: Juliet was making her way to a bus stop when she encountered the Master on the street. He stopped. He took her hand. He smiled, in her phrase, with indescribable tenderness, and gave her a sentence as small and as decisive as any in her life:
Come tomorrow and paint, Juliet.
She came. The studio He had agreed to sit in was a cramped basement of the building He was using on West 78th Street. There was room for the easel and very little else. Juliet was used to standing when she painted, but the ceiling was too low; she had to sit. The Master sat opposite her. He did not look like a man being painted. He looked, she wrote, like a man at work.
Then He gave the instruction that has shaped how Bahá’ís have thought about His station ever since:
I want you to paint My Servitude to God.
Not the face, in other words. Not the venerable beard or the white turban or the great open eyes. The Servitude. He wished to be shown not as the imposing figure He had become to the public press of New York that summer, but as the servant He insisted, again and again, He was — ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the servant of Bahá.
The fourth sitting fell on the nineteenth of June. Lua Getsinger, who was also in the room, would remember the strange concentration of that afternoon. The Master remarked, in Persian, that the sittings made Him sleepy. Juliet, painting, said nothing.
The portrait was eventually lost. Photographs of it survive. But the words spoken in the basement that June have not been lost. Each generation of Bahá’í artists, presented with a holy subject, has had to ask the question Juliet was asked first.
Paraphrased from The Diary of Juliet Thompson (Kalimát Press, 1947); see original for full text.
Cite this story
Thompson, J.. (1947). *The Diary of Juliet Thompson*. Kalimát Press.
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