“The Adoration of the Wise Men,” an illustration from Holman’s Edition of The Holy Bible, published by A. J. Holman & Co. in Philadelphia in 1879. The Bible was presented to John Glessner’s brother George, by their mother, at the time of his marriage in October 1880.
This particular image of the three wise men - Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar - presenting their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the Christ child, is based on a painting by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). The Flemish engraver Theodoor Galle (1571-1633) prepared the engraving which first appeared in the 1614 edition of the Breviarium Romanum, a prayer book published by the Plantin-Moretus Press in Antwerp. In the mid-19th century, the Belgian painter Henry Hendrickx (1817-1894) created a new artwork based on the Galle print, which was then engraved and used in several editions of The Holy Bible beginning in 1864.
The large Bible from which this was taken features an embossed leather cover, marbled endpapers, and a section between the Old and New Testaments for recording family history. George Blocksam Glessner (1846-1926) married Nellie Olds Reeder (1850-1884) on October 27, 1880 in her hometown of Muscatine, Iowa. Sadly, she died just four years later on November 7, 1884 at the age of 34, while seven months pregnant with their first child, who also died. George Glessner never remarried, and when he died in 1926, he left the bulk of his estate to his niece, Frances Glessner Lee, who used the bequest to launch her work in legal medicine and forensic science.