Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision (review)

This handsomely produced volume is the published companion to the recent exhibition of William Holman Hunt’s work at the Manchester Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. While it contains full color reproductions of the works in the exhibition, it is not a traditional exhibition catalog with individual entries on each object. Instead, the images are interspersed between the pages of the ten substantial essays that make up the book. This format was most likely dictated by the recent publication of Judith Bronkhurst’s William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné (2006), which does the work of documenting and reproducing the oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings Hunt produced over his long career. The organizers took advantage of this freedom to commission essays from a wide range of specialists examining various aspects of Hunt’s practice, from Linda Parry’s essay on his interest in textiles to Brenda Rix’s discussion of his work as a printmaker. This wide range is both the book’s strength and perhaps a slight weakness. By situating Hunt within a number of different historical contexts, the essays deliver many new insights about his work, but the book, despite its obvious visual appeal and generalist title, is not the best place for those new to his work to look for an introduction to it.

As the essays take up diverse aspects of Hunt’s career, two major themes emerge. One is the construction of what Matthew Teitelbaum, director of the AGO, calls a “Holman Hunt for the twenty-first century” (9), by focusing on Hunt’s interest in questions of continued relevance, such as the relationship between religious faith, politics and science, and the politics of the Middle East. Jonathan Mane-Wheoki’s essay on The Light of the World (1851–52), perhaps Hunt’s most well-known composition, locates the image within the context of late-nineteenth-century theological debates and Hunt’s own religious beliefs. The essay concludes by following the painted “replica” on its early twentieth-century tour of the colonies and dominions of the British Empire, including an overview of the multiple media into which the image was translated, including stained glass windows, Sunday-school and Bible-class cards, sculpture, and even a parade float. In this fascinating case study in the circulation of images through different contexts, Mane-Wheoki demonstrates how the work became both a devotional image and an icon of British imperialism. In a similar vein, Nicholas Tromans’s essay examines Hunt’s art, writings, and political activism in light of Middle Eastern politics, particularly surrounding the debates over the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Tromans makes the important point that by bringing the exactitude of Pre-Raphaelite vision to the contested landscape of the Middle East, Hunt quite specifically locates paintings such as The Scapegoat (1854–55) “within the context of the Palestine of the 1850s” (139). This insight leads to fascinating interpretations of individual paintings, such as Hunt’s watercolor of the landscape immediately outside the walls of Jerusalem, The Plains of Rephaim from Mount Zion (1855). Tromans suggests this work should be read in light of the controversial expansion of the city at mid-century, interpreting the small anecdote of the man and children seemingly being chased out of the countryside by some youths as an anticipation of the tensions over land ownership that accompanied the development of the city.

The essays also make a point of focusing on lesser-known parts of Hunt’s career, thus disrupting the conventional picture of Hunt as the one Pre-Raphaelite painter who never strayed from the cause (a stereotype Hunt arguably created himself in his autobiography). Carol Jacobi’s essay on the period between 1858 and 1868 is exemplary in this regard. During this decade Hunt turned away from the narrative and religious subjects that had dominated...