William Holman Hunt’s Bible Paintings: A Goat, a Gun and The Light of the World

• Who: William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), English painter, co-founder with John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848.
• Born: 2 April 1827 in Wood Street, Cheapside, in the City of London, above a warehouse his father managed.
• Died: 7 September 1910 in London, aged 83. After cremation his ashes were buried in St Paul’s Cathedral.
• Training: office clerk from about the age of twelve; admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1844 at his third attempt. He never became a member of the Academy.
• Travels: four journeys to Egypt and the Holy Land (1854–56, 1869 to the early 1870s, 1875–78 and 1892–93), where he painted parts of his biggest Bible pictures.
• Family: married Fanny Waugh in 1865; she died in Florence in 1866, weeks after the birth of their son Cyril. In 1875 he married her sister Edith in Switzerland.
• Faith: a Protestant whose faith centred on the person of Christ. He told Ruskin that the evidence for Christ and his teaching was “absolutely convincing” to him.
• Honours: Order of Merit, 1905.
• How many: by our count at least 15 Christian-subject designs in oil, plus the borderline Our English Coasts (“Strayed Sheep”), or about 26 canvases once his replicas and second versions are counted. That is a floor built from museum records and his own memoir, since his full catalogue raisonné, the scholarly list of all his works (Judith Bronkhurst, 2006), is not freely available. Our collection holds 19 of these canvases, including at least one version of every design we traced.
• Bible text: Berean Standard Bible (BSB). Where Hunt put a verse on a frame or in a picture, we quote his wording, usually the King James Version, or the King James equivalent of his Latin.

Hunt’s father ran a warehouse in the City and wanted his son in business, so at about twelve the boy was sent out to work as an office clerk, first for an estate agent and then for the London agents of Richard Cobden’s calico firm. He spent his wages on painting lessons. The Royal Academy Schools turned him down twice. While he was drawing in the British Museum to prepare for a third try, a fifteen-year-old prodigy called John Everett Millais stopped to watch him. Hunt was seventeen, and the Schools took him in 1844.

Christ and the Two Marys (1847 and 1897)

The story: On the first Easter morning, as Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” hurry from the empty tomb outside Jerusalem, the risen Jesus meets them and they take hold of his feet; the gallery that owns Hunt’s picture dates it 1847 and 1897.

Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” They came to Him, grasped His feet, and worshiped Him. “Do not be afraid,” said Jesus. “Go and tell My brothers to go to Galilee. There they will see Me.”

Matthew 28:9–10 · BSB

Early in 1848, as he remembered it, Hunt told Millais what he was after: he wanted viewers to see Christ “with something of the surprise that the Maries themselves felt on meeting Him as One who has come out of the grave.” He refused the usual resurrection banner, which he thought would please only “the art-galvanising revivalists” (painters trying to bring medieval church art back to life). Then he put the canvas away, partly because it had to be enlarged and his money ran out, and partly, he later wrote, because he was steering clear of anything he could not justify “as according with my sincerest convictions.”

In 1848 Hunt, Millais and Rossetti, aged twenty-one, nineteen and twenty, formed a secret society of seven young men, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, named for their love of art from before the Renaissance painter Raphael, and agreed to work, in Hunt’s words, “more persistently derived from Nature” than any story painting before them. Several of them were not yet pious. In a “studio conclave” some of them signed a list of “Immortals” and declared that there was no other immortality. The list still gave Jesus Christ four stars, more than anyone else, “that He might stand supreme above all others.” Hunt later called the document’s stance “practical atheism” and wrote that “our non-belief in the immortality of the soul, therefore, was not long retained.” Within weeks he was designing a picture about missionaries.

A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids (1849–50)

The story: In early Christian Britain, a family of newly converted Britons hides a wounded Christian missionary in their riverside hut while Druids hunt down his companion outside, a scene Hunt painted for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1850.

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.

Hebrews 13:2 · BSB

Hunt painted the river and the hut on the Lea marshes outside London, and he wanted the young woman tending the missionary to be “a fair Celt with red hair,” so Elizabeth Siddal, later Rossetti’s wife, sat for her. He was honest about the result: “the head bore no resemblance to her in grace and refinement.” The 1850 press savaged the Brotherhood, and the picture came back from the Academy “unsold and uninquired for” until Millais found a buyer for it. Half a century on, Hunt said he could look at it “as though the young man who did it had been some other.”

The Hireling Shepherd (1851)

The story: In a sunlit meadow near Ewell in Surrey, a farmhand who should be minding his sheep shows a girl a death’s-head moth while his flock strays into the wheat, in a picture Hunt exhibited in 1852 with lines from King Lear about a careless shepherd.

The hired hand is not the shepherd, and the sheep are not his own. When he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf pounces on them and scatters the flock. The man runs away because he is a hired servant and is unconcerned for the sheep.

John 10:12–13 · BSB

Early viewers saw a farmhand neglecting his sheep for a girl. In 1897 Hunt explained in a letter that his shepherd was “a type thus of other muddle headed pastors who instead of performing their services to their flock — which is in constant peril — discuss vain questions of no value to any human soul.” He added a farmer’s detail that turns the sunny meadow grim: the sheep in the corn are “doomed to destruction from becoming what farmers call ‘blown.’” Jesus’s hired hand in John 10 fits that explanation, though the pairing with this painting is ours.

In May 1851 the critic John Ruskin, the author of Modern Painters, defended “Mr. Millais and Mr. Hunt” in letters to The Times. But that summer’s exhibition closed without a sale, and Hunt thought of giving up painting to farm in Canada. Millais offered him money to keep going, Hunt went back to The Hireling Shepherd, and that autumn he began the picture he is best known for.

The Light of the World (1851–53, Keble College)

The story: Christ, crowned with thorns and carrying a lantern, knocks at night on a long-shut, weed-grown door, the image of Revelation 3:20 that Hunt painted in 1851–53 in an orchard at Worcester Park Farm in Surrey and in his Chelsea studio.

Once again, Jesus spoke to the people and said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows Me will never walk in the darkness, but will have the light of life.”

John 8:12 · BSB

Hunt started from a single verse: “there is a text in Revelation, ‘Behold, I stand at the door, and knock.’ Nothing is said about the night, but I wish to accentuate the point of its meaning by making it the time of darkness, and that brings us to the need of the lantern in Christ’s hand.” Because the scene was set at night, he painted it at night. By his own account he sat in a little hut of hurdles in the orchard, feet in a sack of straw, working by candlelight from about nine in the evening until five in the morning, and the village policeman took him for the farm’s ghost. The door came from a night walk, when he found the abandoned hut of the local gunpowder workers. Painted across the top of the canvas, beside his signature, is a Latin plea, “Me non prætermisso, Domine!”, roughly Lord, do not pass me by.

At the Royal Academy in 1854, The Athenaeum found in the face “such a strange mingling of disgust, fear, and imbecility, that we turn from it to relieve the sight.” Ruskin wrote to The Times that “few stopped to look at it,” and that those who did mostly sneered at the idea of a Saviour with a lantern. Then he gave his own verdict: “For my own part, I think it one of the very noblest works of sacred art ever produced in this or any other age.” Before the exhibition, Thomas Carlyle had come to the studio and dismissed it as “a mere papistical fantasy,” and Hunt answered, as he recalled, that he “did firmly believe in the idea that I had painted, more than anything I saw with my natural eyes.” His patron Thomas Combe of Oxford bought it, and in 1872 Combe’s widow gave it to Keble College, where it still hangs.

Hunt wanted the question left open: “One strong interest in my design,” he wrote, “depends on the uncertainty as to whether the being within will respond.” The verse he painted leaves the answer with the one inside: “If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in.”

Strayed Sheep (Our English Coasts, 1852)

The story: In the autumn of 1852, on the cliffs at Fairlight near Hastings, Hunt painted a flock of sheep with no shepherd in sight straying at the edge of the drop to the sea, and showed it the next year as Our English Coasts, 1852.

We all like sheep have gone astray, each one has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid upon Him the iniquity of us all.

Isaiah 53:6 · BSB

It began as a cut-price commission for a copy of just the sheep from The Hireling Shepherd, for seventy guineas, but Hunt “longed to paint an original picture instead of a copy” and gave the buyer this instead. His friend F. G. Stephens said it “might be taken as a satire on the reported defenceless state of the country against foreign invasion,” then decided it had a deeper meaning and “was of men, and not of sheep.” His German biographer insisted in 1907 that “no symbolism whatever is hidden in this painting” (our translation). We haven’t found Hunt calling it a Bible picture; the pairing with Isaiah’s straying sheep is ours.

The Awakening Conscience (1853)

The story: In a newly furnished villa room in 1850s London, a young woman kept by her lover starts up from his lap as he sings at the piano, the moment of conscience that Hunt painted as a “material counterpart” to The Light of the World.

So it is said: “Wake up, O sleeper, rise up from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

Ephesians 5:14 · BSB

Hunt explained the pairing himself: while The Light of the World was on his easel in 1851, “it occurred to me that my spiritual subject called for a material counterpart in a picture representing in actual life the manner in which the appeal of the spirit of heavenly love calls a soul to abandon a lower life.” His starting point was a proverb about singing songs to a heavy heart (Proverbs 25:20), which led him to see how the girl’s companion “might himself be the unconscious utterer of a divine message.” The Athenaeum reported that “innocent and unenlightened spectators suppose it to represent a quarrel between a brother and sister.” Ruskin told readers of The Times that in the whole Academy, or in all the country’s galleries, there would “not be found one powerful as this to meet full in the front the moral evil of the age in which it is painted.” The face you’re looking at isn’t the one Ruskin praised: “After some years the possessors, feeling that the expression of the girl was painful, persuaded me to change it.”

Hunt finished The Awakening Conscience in January 1854 (“by four o’clock I had accomplished all”) and left London for the East the same day. The plan, he said, went back to his boyhood Bible lessons. His aim was blunt: “Art has often illustrated the theme, but it has surrounded it with many enervating fables, and perverted the heroic drama with feeble interpretation.” After Cairo he reached Jerusalem, and in November he rode down to the Dead Sea.

The Scapegoat (1854–56, Lady Lever Art Gallery)

The story: Following the Day of Atonement law in Leviticus 16, a goat carrying the sins of Israel is driven into the wilderness; Hunt painted the salt shore at Oosdoom on the Dead Sea for about two weeks from mid-November 1854, with an Arab escort, and finished the goat in Jerusalem.

The goat will carry on itself all their iniquities into a solitary place, and the man will release it into the wilderness.

Leviticus 16:22 · BSB

The goats paid a price for the realism. The one Hunt took to the Dead Sea collapsed on the way back to Jerusalem, and he sketched it as “he sank and died, much to my regret.” A second died before he could paint a stroke, and the goat in the picture is the third.

London was puzzled. The Times complained that “were it not for the title annexed it would be rather difficult to divine the nature of the subject.” The Athenaeum granted that “brute grief was never more powerfully expressed” and then shrugged: “Still the goat is but a goat.” The Art Journal thought it would suit the museum of the Zoological Gardens “as a portrait of an animal that lived happily and died lamented.” Hunt had kept painting in front of armed horsemen, and one critic wondered whether the result belonged in the zoo.

The meaning started arguments of its own. According to the scholar George Landow, Hunt put two verses on the frame, Leviticus 16:22 and Isaiah 53:4: “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.” Most viewers, Hunt recalled, took the goat as “the unhappy bearer of the sins of others,” while the preacher Charles Spurgeon and other theologians “denounced the work as heretical,” because to them the goat should stand for the risen Christ. Hunt sided with the common reading, and added that the Apostles saw in the outcast goat the persecuted Church. Isaiah’s servant, whom Christians read as Christ, is “pierced for our transgressions” in the very next verse.

The Scapegoat (1854–55, Manchester Art Gallery)

The story: Hunt also painted this smaller Scapegoat in 1854–55, setting the goat of Leviticus 16, sent into the wilderness carrying Israel’s sins, on the Dead Sea shore under a rainbow; Manchester Art Gallery bought it in 1906.

Then he is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and rebellious acts of the Israelites in regard to all their sins. He is to put them on the goat’s head and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man appointed for the task.

Leviticus 16:21 · BSB

Of the two Scapegoats, only this one has a rainbow. On his first view of the Dead Sea plain Hunt saw “the celestial image of Heaven’s mercy in the shape of a magnificent rainbow,” spanning the whole plain, though he never says he put it in this picture. Scholars disagree about where it fits. George Landow calls it Hunt’s original oil study for the big picture, while Hunt’s 1902 cataloguer mentions “a small replica, which was until lately in the possession of Lord Brassey, but cannot now be traced,” which may or may not be this one. In Genesis the rainbow is the sign of God’s promise that a flood will never again destroy the earth, a hopeful thing to paint over a goat carrying sin into the wilderness.

Before and after the Dead Sea, Hunt lived in Jerusalem and worked on a picture of the boy Jesus in the Temple. He wanted Jewish models for the teachers, and Jerusalem’s rabbis forbade anyone to visit his house. He appealed to the philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore to have the ban lifted. In February 1856 he was back in London, two years and a month after he left, and the Temple picture took another four years.

The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1862, Sudley House)

The story: In the Temple at Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph find the twelve-year-old Jesus among the teachers after three days of searching; the painting shown is Hunt’s smaller 1862 version at Sudley House, following the original he developed in Jerusalem and London between 1854 and 1860.

“Why were you looking for Me?” He asked. “Did you not know that I had to be in My Father’s house?”

Luke 2:49 · BSB

Finding models for the original Birmingham picture was a long fight. A Jerusalem merchant, Daoud Levi, refused to sit because, as Hunt’s interpreter explained it, on Judgment Day his painted portrait might be let into heaven first, and Levi himself would then be turned away as an impostor. On the gilded Temple door, round a carved rosette, Hunt painted Malachi 3:1 in Latin with a Hebrew line beneath: “the Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple.” Just below those words stands Joseph, one of the two who had spent three days looking for him. When Charles Dickens asked how long the picture had taken, Hunt answered: “Six, with many intervals on smaller works, executed to bring grist to the mill.”

For that original, Hunt had already told the novelist Wilkie Collins what he would ask: “Nothing less, I assure you, than 5500 guineas — a price that has never been given in England for a modern picture.” When he finally named the figure to the dealer Ernest Gambart, the reply, as Hunt told it, was “Oh, but it is impossible, no one ever heard of such a sum.” Gambart paid it in instalments. Ten years earlier Dickens had mocked the Pre-Raphaelites in print; now he was backing Hunt’s price and advising him on the terms. Luke’s scene turns on the boy’s answer to his anxious parents, that he had to be in his Father’s house, and Hunt said the purpose of those six years was “attempting to realise the actual history of the divine Man.”

The School-Girl’s Hymn (1859)

The story: Hunt painted a girl on her way to school one summer Sunday morning, singing her hymn, in a small panel of 1859, using as his model Miriam Wilkinson, a labourer’s daughter he had met near Hastings.

Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.

Colossians 3:16 · BSB

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which owns it, frankly calls it a pot-boiler, a picture painted to pay the bills, and quotes a description of “a girl going to school in a smiling summer Sunday morning, singing her hymn as she walks along.” Hunt’s 1902 cataloguer wrote that it “cannot now be found,” although it had been in Oxford for years with the rest of his patron Thomas Combe’s collection. The picture doesn’t say which hymn she is singing.

In December 1865 Hunt married Fanny Waugh. The next year they set out for the East, a cholera quarantine stranded them in Florence, and there that autumn their son Cyril was born. Before the year was out, Fanny was dead. Hunt’s memoir breaks off at a row of asterisks and resumes: “In September of the next year I returned to England with my motherless child.” Back in Florence later, when the stone carver dawdled over her tomb, “I took up his tools and finished the work.”

Morning Prayer (c. 1866, date disputed)

The story: A young woman kneels to pray beside her bed at the start of the day, a small domestic picture by Hunt that belonged in 1905 to A. F. Yarrow and is still in a private collection.

In the morning, O LORD, You hear my voice; at daybreak I lay my plea before You and wait in expectation.

Psalm 5:3 · BSB

Even its date is a puzzle. Hunt’s German biographer read the monogram as 1856; an auction catalogue, quoting an undated letter in which Hunt says he is “working closely at the little picture of the girl praying,” places it around 1866, when, the letter suggests, he made a drawing from it for a book illustration. In 1902 his cataloguer listed it among the “missing pictures”; three years later Hunt reproduced it in his memoir with its owner’s name. The biographer wrote that it had “strengthened others in their faith” (our translation).

In the summer of 1869 Hunt went East again and settled in Jerusalem. He read Ernest Renan’s best-selling Life of Jesus there and rejected its Jesus as “a mere provincial and enthusiastic dervish.” Mark’s Gospel calls Jesus “the carpenter,” and Hunt noted that hardly anyone since the second-century writer Justin Martyr had dwelt on the fact. He wanted to paint those working years, and he thought such a picture “was calculated to make the world realise more fully the value of His example in the perfection of His human life.”

The Shadow of Death (1870–73)

The story: In a scene Hunt imagined in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth, Jesus stretches at sunset and his shadow falls on the tool-rack like a crucified man, while Mary, kneeling at a chest of the wise men’s gifts, sees it; Hunt painted it in Jerusalem and Bethlehem from 1870 and finished it in London in 1873.

Then Simeon blessed them and said to His mother Mary: “Behold, this Child is appointed to cause the rise and fall of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your soul as well.”

Luke 2:34–35 · BSB

Hunt described the moment himself: “The sun at this moment projected His shadow on the wall, and the tool-rack accentuated the resemblance to that of a crucified man.” He painted much of it on a Bethlehem roof, “in uninterrupted sunlight,” from local models. He hid Mary’s face on purpose: he tried many arrangements that showed it, “but I had rejected all, from conviction that nothing but the direct glance at the shadow gave the tragedy of the idea.” Visitors in Jerusalem were not convinced: “we have been here twenty minutes looking at the front of the Messiah and the back of the Sit Miriam; is it not natural that now we should wish to see the face of Sit Miriam and the back of the Christ?” (Sit Miriam is “Lady Mary.”) Hunt also heard that the local Catholic clergy told their people to stay away, calling the hidden face “a Protestant indignity to the Madonna.”

The dealers Agnew paid £5,500 down for the picture and its first study, and sold an engraving for two guineas that working people paid off “week by week in instalments.” That delighted Hunt: “This was exactly what I most desired, the dutiful humility of Christ’s life thus carrying its deepest lesson.” Simeon had told Mary in the Temple that a sword would pierce her soul. Hunt shows her years later, on an ordinary evening at home, meeting a shadow of it.

English law did not allow a man to marry his dead wife’s sister, so in 1875 Hunt married Edith Waugh in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. They sailed for Jerusalem with Cyril, Hunt’s painting materials arrived months late, and their daughter Gladys was born there. The picture he began on that trip gave him years of trouble, and it started with a small canvas he already had.

The Triumph of the Innocents (1870–1903, Harvard)

The story: Hunt began this small first version of the Holy Family’s night flight from Bethlehem toward Egypt, with the spirits of the infants Herod killed escorting them, in Jerusalem around 1870, and finished it in 1903.

So he got up, took the Child and His mother by night, and withdrew to Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called My Son.”

Matthew 2:14–15 · BSB

It is signed and dated “18 WHH 70-6,” though Harvard, which owns it, says Hunt did not finish it until 1903. When he got back to Jerusalem in the mid-1870s and found his rented house wrecked by “rain, moth, and rust,” he also found that “the study for ‘The Triumph of the Innocents,’ having been packed away, had alone escaped injury.” A visitor to his studio counted “seventeen babies in the large picture, and several more in the small one.” On our images, the airborne group in this small version is indeed larger than in the finished Walker canvas.

The Triumph of the Innocents (1876–87, Walker Art Gallery)

The story: Fleeing Herod’s massacre at Bethlehem, Joseph leads Mary and the infant Jesus by night toward Egypt, and Hunt, who began this canvas in Jerusalem in 1876 and finished it in England in 1887, surrounds them with the glowing spirits of the murdered Innocents.

Then what was spoken through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”

Matthew 2:17–18 · BSB

With his own materials lost in transit, Hunt bought linen in the Jerusalem bazaar, and its warped surface defeated him for seven and a half years. Back in London in 1878, he wrote that “unpacking my painting was like the reapparition of an appalling ghost that had been laid for a time.” Relining failed, so he started a second canvas in 1883, now at Tate, and then had the flawed centre of this one, with Mary and the Child, cut out and replaced with new canvas. Ruskin, seeing it unfinished, predicted that if Hunt’s health held it would be “the greatest religious painting of our time.”

The idea behind it was Hunt’s own: “since the little playmates of Jesus had been a vicarious sacrifice, they would in their spiritual life be still constant in their love for the forlorn but Heaven-defended family.” Matthew leaves the mothers of Bethlehem weeping and refusing comfort, and he does not hurry them. Hunt’s picture is his hope for their children, set beside that grief rather than in place of it: in the 1885 pamphlet that went with the London version, he wrote, echoing Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, that “death is already seen to have no sting, the grave no victory.”

From about 1888 the painter Edward Robert Hughes worked as Hunt’s studio assistant, according to Birmingham Museums. In the autumn of 1892 Hunt and Edith set off on his last journey East, through Italy, Greece and Egypt, and they were in Jerusalem for the Orthodox Easter of 1893.

May Morning on Magdalen College Tower (1888–93, Birmingham)

The story: At sunrise on the first of May the choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, sings a hymn from the top of the college tower, an old custom that Hunt painted in this small version on the tower roof itself.

Awake, my glory! Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awaken the dawn.

Psalm 57:8 · BSB

“For several weeks I mounted to the Tower roof about four in the morning with my small canvas to watch for the first rays of the rising sun,” Hunt wrote, and “when all was settled I repeated the composition upon a larger canvas,” which is now at the Lady Lever Art Gallery near Liverpool. He thought the custom was “a survival of primitive sun-worship, — perhaps Druidical,” and at the head of his chapter on it he printed a saying attributed to “Cama,” an Indian Parsee (a member of the Zoroastrian community), about bowing to the rising sun. Look right and you’ll find a turbaned, bearded figure among the college men; Hunt’s German biographer described the Parsee as painted “in an attitude of prayer” (our translation). In the psalm paired here, it’s the singer who wakes the dawn, and the song is for God.

The Miracle of the Sacred Fire (1892–99)

The story: On Orthodox Holy Saturday in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a vast crowd of pilgrims surges toward the shrine over the traditional site of Christ’s tomb as the “holy fire” is passed from candle to candle, a scene Hunt sketched in 1893 and finished in 1899.

The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1:5 · BSB

Hunt had watched the ceremony since 1855, and as a Protestant he disapproved of it. He likened it to the “mad excitement” of the crowd at Ephesus (the riot described in Acts 19), and he designed a frame topped by the seven-branched candlestick of religious truth, “negligently left to emit smoke, thereby spreading darkness and concealing the stars of Heaven.” He also claimed the scene “had never yet been painted,” although, as his own cataloguer pointed out, a painter called Girardet showed a picture of the same event in Paris the very same year. Whatever he thought of the ritual, the hundreds of pilgrims in his picture were there because of Easter.

The Importunate Neighbour (1895)

The story: A man goes to his friend’s door at midnight to borrow three loaves for a traveller, in the parable Jesus told in Luke 11 about persistence in prayer; Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria bought Hunt’s picture in 1905.

So I tell you: Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.

Luke 11:9–10 · BSB

The design grew out of illustrations Hunt was making for Sir Edwin Arnold’s poem The Light of the World, the same title as his own most famous picture. If you think you see an inscription over the door, look again: Hunt’s German biographer noticed that it turns out, “on closer inspection,” to be a seven-branched candlestick worked as an ornament (our translation). More than forty years after painting Christ knocking at a shut door, Hunt painted a man at one. In Revelation it is Christ who stands at the door; in Luke 11 Jesus tells his listeners to do the knocking, and promises that the door will open.

Hunt’s eyesight was failing in his last years, and Hughes helped him finish his late pictures. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1905, the year he published his two-volume memoir, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which argues at length that he and Millais, not Rossetti, had started the movement.

The Beloved (1898)

The story: In 1898 Hunt turned Queen Victoria’s request for a copy of Christ’s head from The Shadow of Death into a new picture of Christ looking up into an open sky, now in the Royal Collection.

Then I said, “Here I am, I have come—it is written about me in the scroll: I delight to do Your will, O my God; Your law is within my heart.”

Psalm 40:7–8 · BSB

A 1906 exhibition catalogue explains why a copy would not do: “the pose of the arms in the larger work compelled a change of treatment for the limits of the smaller picture.” So Hunt painted a new composition, which by 1905 belonged to King Edward VII. According to the scholar George Landow, its frame carries “Lo. I come, in the volume of the Book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will O God,” words from Psalm 40 in a form close to Hebrews 10:7, where the letter puts them in Christ’s mouth as he comes into the world.

The Light of the World (1900–04, St Paul’s Cathedral)

The story: Between 1900 and 1904 the elderly Hunt, helped by Edward Robert Hughes, painted The Light of the World again with a life-size figure; after the buyer, the social reformer Charles Booth, sent it on tour through the British Empire, it was given to St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1908.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with him, and he with Me.

Revelation 3:20 · BSB

Hunt gave two reasons. He worried about the original’s safety, “having frequent reasons to doubt the safety of the work,” and he disliked that Keble College charged admission. Keble’s Warden admitted in The Times that visitors could see it “on payment of a small fee,” and Hunt replied that “one of my reasons for painting the replica was the hope that it would be accessible to all.” In 1851 he had wanted a life-size Christ, but that “would then have forbidden any hope of sale.” Fifty years later, with failing eyesight and an assistant at his side, he did it anyway. It went to St Paul’s, where Hunt’s own ashes were buried two years later. Its frame carries Revelation 3:20 in old capitals, with “SVP” for “sup,” the same verse that runs beneath the Keble picture, with its promise of a shared meal.

“Hunt was converted while painting The Light of the World.” His memoir tells a quieter story. At twenty-one he was one of a group of friends who drew up a list of “Immortals” in a “studio conclave,” a document whose denial of any afterlife he later called “practical atheism,” and he says that unbelief “was not long retained.” By 1853 he was telling Carlyle he believed what he had painted “more than anything I saw with my natural eyes.” We found no conversion scene, and the often-quoted line about painting it “by Divine command” is not in his memoir.

“The door has no handle because it can only be opened from inside, as Hunt explained.” We could not trace that explanation to Hunt or to his time. Hunt’s own gloss was: “The closed door was the obstinately shut mind, the weeds the cumber of daily neglect.” Ruskin in 1854 read the ivy as “showing that it has never been opened.” We found the handle saying only in later, undated retellings.

“Seven million people saw it on its world tour.” The tour was real: Charles Booth sent the St Paul’s version around the Empire before 1908. The figure of seven million, and the claim that four-fifths of Australia saw it, are repeated widely but we found no count behind them.

“Hunt went blind.” His eyesight deteriorated in later life—Birmingham Museums attributes this to glaucoma—and Edward Robert Hughes helped him finish his late pictures. The sources consulted here do not establish whether he eventually lost all sight.

“He sat at the Dead Sea with a rifle across his knees.” Close, but what he describes is going on painting while armed horsemen rode up, “steadying my touch by resting the hand on my double-barrelled gun.” The goat story is grimmer than the legend: two goats died, and the one in the picture is the third.

“Dickens attacked Hunt.” Dickens attacked the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1850, but his target was Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents, and his article names no painter. Ten years later Dickens was backing Hunt’s 5,500-guinea price for The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple and advising him how to be paid.

“The Finding was the most expensive painting by a living artist.” That boast was Hunt’s own, and narrower: 5,500 guineas was, he said, “a price that has never been given in England for a modern picture.”

Visio Divina (Latin for “divine seeing”) is a way of praying with an image, modelled on lectio divina (“divine reading”), the old monastic way of praying slowly through Scripture. Try it with The Light of the World (1851–53).

1. Look. Stay with the picture for a minute before you think about it. Notice where the light in the picture is coming from.
2. Meditate. Read Revelation 3:20 slowly: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with him, and he with Me.” Which door in your life has gone quiet and overgrown?
3. Pray. Tell Christ honestly what is piled up against that door, and ask him to come in.
4. Contemplate. Sit quietly with the thought that he knocks and waits, and that he promises to come in and share the meal.

Who was William Holman Hunt?

William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) was an English painter who co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He made four long journeys to Egypt and the Holy Land to paint Bible subjects, and he is best known for The Light of the World, The Scapegoat and The Shadow of Death.

What is William Holman Hunt’s most famous painting?

William Holman Hunt’s most famous painting is The Light of the World, which shows Christ with a lantern knocking at a shut door. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica thought it had “perhaps the greatest effect of any religious painting of the century.” There are three versions: Keble College, Oxford (1851–53), a small one at Manchester Art Gallery, and the life-size late version in St Paul’s Cathedral, London (1900–04).

Where is The Light of the World?

The original (1851–53) hangs in Keble College, Oxford. The life-size version Hunt painted with Edward Robert Hughes in 1900–04 is in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, and a small version is at Manchester Art Gallery.

What does The Scapegoat mean?

The Scapegoat shows the goat of the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16, which carried Israel’s sins into the wilderness. On the frame Hunt put Leviticus 16:22 beside Isaiah 53:4, “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows,” from the passage about the suffering servant whom Christians read as Christ. Hunt took the goat as the bearer of other people’s sins, and in his memoir he also saw in it the persecuted Church.

Was William Holman Hunt religious?

Yes. After a brief youthful flirtation with unbelief, he returned again and again to the life of Christ and said he believed in the idea he had painted in The Light of the World “more than anything I saw with my natural eyes.” He was a Protestant who wanted to strip away what he called the “sacerdotal gloss” (the priestly layers the churches had added) on Christ’s life. That drew fire from both sides: Carlyle called that picture “a mere papistical fantasy,” and what Hunt called the extreme High Church party, the most Catholic-leaning wing of the Church of England, found his human Jesus “wanting in reverence.”

How many religious paintings did Holman Hunt paint?

By our count at least 15 Christian-subject designs in oil, plus the borderline Our English Coasts (“Strayed Sheep”): about 26 canvases including his replicas and second versions, from Christ and the Two Marys (begun 1847) to the St Paul’s Light of the World (1900–04). That is a floor, built from museum records and his own memoir. Our collection holds 19 of them, including at least one version of every design we traced.

Where can I see William Holman Hunt’s Bible paintings?

The paintings in our collection are in England at Keble College and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, St Paul’s Cathedral and Tate Britain in London, Manchester Art Gallery, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the Walker Art Gallery and Sudley House in Liverpool, and the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight. Abroad: Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. The Beloved is in the Royal Collection and Morning Prayer is privately owned, so check that a work is on view before you travel.

Explore these paintings as jigsaw puzzles in our Open Gallery. Each painting above links to its matching puzzle. Start with one of these:

• Christ and the Two Marys
• Strayed Sheep
• The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple

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