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 Analogies from the Bible, Myth and Fable

 “Satan, Don’t Get Thee Behind Me!”
  Source:  Harper’s Weekly
  Date:   August 17, 1872, pp. 640-641

Click to see a large version of this cartoon...

Click to see a large version of this cartoon

Complete HarpWeek Explanation:
The week after “Babes of the Wood,” Nast seems to have been utterly incapable of resisting temptation himself.  In “Satan Don’t Get Thee Behind Me!  Any Thing to Get Possession” (dated August 17; published August 7), the pious Greeley is shown in a brutal burlesque of Jesus’ temptation on the mountain.  The Tribune editor is begging abjectly for the support of the Democratic devil to help him enter the governmental “Kingdom of Washington” spread out before him.  Nast’s huge, two-page cartoon is modeled after a comparatively ethereal image of the same scene by Gustave Dore in his illustrated Holy Bible (1866, Vol. II, p. 171).

 

 
 

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