The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures

E-text prepared by Sankar Viswanathan, Colin Bell, Joseph Cooper, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Transcriber's Note.
The images in this eBook of the paintings are from the original book. However many of these paintings have undergone extensive restoration. The restored paintings are presented as modern color images with links.

Dear Children:
The stories I am telling about the pictures and their painters in this book are gathered from many countries. Some of them belong to very early times when history was told to grown up people by story-tellers at banquets and in the homes, on the street corners and public halls. Some of the stories are legends and traditions that grew up with the beginnings of the Christian era. All of them are taken from authentic sources and many of them illustrate some natural law.
The artists who painted these pictures knew history and the early myths, the fairy-tales, the legends and the traditions, the Bible and the Apocrypha. We love these pictures because they are beautiful and true, but really to understand them we must know what the artists had in mind when they painted them.
If you learn to know these pictures and love them, I will make you another book soon about statues and their stories.
With love and best wishes, from your friend,
Lorinda Munson Bryant

n looking at pictures of the old masters you will often see one called the Holy Family. I want you to know who belonged to the Holy Family. The grown people are Joseph and Mary, the father and mother of Jesus; they had no last names at that time. The children are Jesus and his cousin, John the Baptist, six months older than Jesus. Sometimes the little John's mother, Elizabeth, is in the picture and sometimes his father, Zacharias, is there also.