Born in 1859, at Trichinopoly in India, where his father served in the military, James Swan Freemantle traveled throughout the Middle East during his own years as a soldier in the British Army. Shortly after his second marriage, he began a hand-lettered, illustrated volume of the Psalms for his beloved bride, Clara, who was fifteen years his junior. Over the next thirty years, he worked periodically to transfer these psalms into a book that would pictographically match the lyrical beauty of the poetry. He died of pneumonia in 1934, the year that he completed The Psalms of David. It was many years later, in 1982, that his son, Stephen, decided to have it published.
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