Painting the Bible. Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain (review)

Painting the Bible begins with the bold statement that '[d]espite the centrality of religion to Victorian culture, this is the first study to engage with the theory and practice of religious painting in nineteenth-century Britain' (1), which hardly does justice to Lindsay Errington's published thesis, Social and religious themes in English art 1840-1860 (New York and London, 1984). However it is surprising that nineteenth-century British religious art should have received so little thorough study. It has been touched on briefly in general histories, but the overwhelming majority of comment has been in academic chapters and articles on Pre-Raphaelite works, which emphasis is maintained in the present book. The analysis concentrates on a handful of well-known works (it is tempting to call them the usual suspects) produced between about 1840 and 1870: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848-9); Christ in the House of his Parents (The Carpenter's Shop) (1849-50) by John Everett Millais, and three works by William Holman Hunt: The Light of the World (1851-3), The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854-60) and The Shadow of Death (1870-3): Hunt was the nearest thing to a specialist in religious painting that Britain could then boast.

The first chapter introduces themes which are summed up in two quotations from the art critic and Pre-Raphaelite record-keeper, W.M. Rossetti, which encapsulate the two main problems confronting artists. In the first he wrote that '[t]he learning of the age may be a benefit to its art, or a misfortune; but it is a fact, and cannot be ignored' (1). Despite the statement on the same page that '[r]esearch in disciplines such as geology, palaeontology, history and ethnography repeatedly challenged established biblical truths' (1), so far as Painting the Bible is concerned the 'learning of the age' means biblical higher criticism and topographic and ethnographic knowledge, that is knowledge particularly suitable to the visual expression of biblical subjects. In the second, Rossetti asked how the artist was to attain 'a wholly fresh and original realization of themes at once sacred and stale' (11). In Rossetti's opinion the possibility that knowledge gained through travel could bring about the renewal of religious art was realized by Holman Hunt. Hunt confidently informed his friend, the painter Augustus Egg, that he intended 'to prove, so far as my painting can, that Christianity is a living faith; that the fullest realization of its wondrous story cannot unspiritualize it'.¹ The artistic problem of finding new, modern ways to represent biblical subjects, and the figure of Christ especially, was all the greater in an age riddled with Tennysonian 'honest doubt' and new ideas about the historical Christ influenced by David Strauss's Das Leben Jesu (1835) and Ernest Renan's Vie de Jésus (1863). In his Preface, Renan's English translator wrote, echoing Hunt, that 'The great problem of the present age is to preserve the religious spirit, whilst getting rid of the superstitions and absurdities that deform it, and which are alike opposed to science and common sense' (quoted 128).²

The second chapter sets out rival theories on realism and idealism in religious art with reference to the Royal Academy (RA), the primary artistic body of the day. The lectures of Henry Howard and his successor, C.R. Leslie, professors of painting from 1833-47 and 1847-52 respectively, are analysed. This section also contrasts the work in the 1840s of B.R. Haydon, whose large religious paintings in a traditional academic-classical mode rapidly lost their audience, with that of C.L. Eastlake who progressively infused religious scenes with domestic sentiment, becoming 'a painter for the mass as well as for the "select"' (quoted 49). A younger generation including William Dyce and J.R. Herbert responsible for 'modification and innovation' in religious painting are also discussed. This...