Desperate Romantics?

In September I had the happy occasion of visiting St Paul’s Cathedral London to attend a special service. There in the nave of Christopher Wren’s great architectural masterpiece is Holman Hunt’s, Light of the World (1853-54), reputedly painted at night. I vividly remember a copy of the painting hanging on my Sunday school wall; a kingly robed Jesus with crown of thorns and comforting glow of a lantern stands on a footpath preparing to knock on a door covered in luxuriant overgrown plants, vines and passion flowers, whose door has no handle and can only be opened from the inside.

The original painting I later discovered is hung in a side room off the large pretentious chapel at Keble College, Oxford. Towards the end of his life, the Victorian painter painted a life-size version, which after a world tour “of the colonies” is the one hanging in St Paul’s. In 2001 the seven sided brass lantern designed by Hunt for use in the painting was found hanging in a stairwell of a London suburban house. It sold at auction for £30,000!

John Ruskin once wrote of this painting "It is, I believe, the most perfect instance of expressional purpose and technical power which has ever been produced." The painting has been copied in many a stained glass church window: Boldon URC has one in its sanctuary: a gold crown replaces the crown of thorns. The painting proved to be a turning point in Hunt’s artistic and spiritual life. It records his conversion to the Christian faith.

Hunt belonged to a brotherhood of painters called the Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian men who were to blow the art world apart. The private lives of the brotherhood were recently shown in a BBC six part drama called Desperate Romantics, a television tie-in of the published biography of the tangled lives of the pre-Raphaelites created by Franny Moyle. The costume drama was heavily criticised. I thought it was unfair and all too easy to snigger at poor old John Ruskin, the influential English art critic and social thinker; the three prominent members of the brotherhood were often depicted as a boy-style band with background jaunty music, Rossetti portrayed as a selfish irreligious creep, Holman Hunt an arrogant hulking freak, and John Millais (who is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral) a petulant wimp, whose bottom lip permanently quivered. And, of course, sex. A lot of sex, groupie and otherwise. But we all knew the pre Raphaelites liked to bed their models, Annie Miller in particular.

Apart from bizarre lives what the Pre-Raphaelites had in abundance was imagination and vision - rare qualities at a time when society was thrusting forward with post-Industrial Revolution invention and fervour. The brotherhood spawned passionate young vibrant painters of Christian symbolism that was lifted from pre-reformation sources and applied to post-reformation piety.

In the 1850s Hunt travelled widely in Palestine. His researches there were aimed at finding accurate, historical detail with which to bring alive biblical images and present them devotionally to his admiring art lovers. One of the best examples of this is The Scapegoat, (1854/55, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool). Hunt had the idea for the painting whilst studying the Talmud. His research disclosed that on the Festival of the Day of Atonement, a goat was ejected from the temple with a scarlet piece of woollen cloth on its head. It was goaded and driven, either to death or into the wilderness, carrying with it the sins of the congregation. It was believed that if these sins were forgiven the scarlet cloth would turn white. Hunt regarded the Old Testament scapegoat (Leviticus 16 v22) as a pre-figurement of the New Testament Christ whose suffering and death similarly expunged man's sins. Hunt chose to set his goat in a landscape of quite hideous desolation - it was painted on the shore of the Dead Sea at Osdoom with the mountains of Edom in the distance.

Like most of the pre-Raphaelite paintings they are a bit too neat for modern taste, but they certainly captured the religious imagination of the late 19th century, though not without scandalising some. And that is why this art matters. For a nation whose religious sensitivities had sanitised the imagination, these images were truly shocking. Charles Dickens wrote a fearsome letter denouncing Millais' painting of Christ in the house of his parents 1849/50 because it associated the Son of God with dirt, work and degradation. The half-naked image of Jesus, in cruciform shape in Hunt’s The Shadow of Death 1869-73 was no less troubling to people for whom the sight of a crucifix was alien and repugnant, too Catholic by far.

Years later, as Sunday Schools walls have revealed, Hunt’s painting of The Light of the World still has popular appeal, in large measure because it tells a story and invites the viewer on a sort of hide and seek of Biblical themes and allusions. But perhaps more important than this appeal is the legacy left by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of art as subversion and disturbance. Their art contributed to the challenging of a complaisant, comfortable Church. It awoke a generation to the force of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the imperative of his mission. We should be optimistic that in our day we can still find contemporary exciting artists with imagination and energy who will provoke us in to new visions of the unchanging God revealed in Christ, and the mission he entrusts to us.

Ray Anglesea