Holman Hunt's visions of Isaiah 53.6

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.(Isaiah 53.6)

Occasionally these days, we are aware of an outrageous argument in the world of Art - an unmade bed offered as Art, or a winner of the Turner Prize that even Turner himself would have laughed to scorn - but such things are as nothing compared with the dramas about to unfold in the year 1850.

In 1850, Art was mixing with Religion in a new way and the combination was to prove highly explosive. By the time John Everett Millais made public his painting, "Christ in the House of his Parents", the "Establishment" were up for a bit of highly reactionary invective and Millais' painting got slammed, not least by the novelist, Charles Dickens, who described Millais' representation of Mary as looking like a "monster in the vilest cabaret of France, or the lowest gin-shop in England." Of course, she was nothing of the sort, but the highly naturalistic or realistic treatment of the scene, according to the new principles of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, initially concealed the powerful symbolism in the painting of an imagined scene in the carpenter's shop in Nazareth. The critics even latched onto the fact that beyond the open doorway of the carpenter's shop a flock of sheep were penned. They said that this proved that the painting was a vile piece of papist propaganda because the sheep represented the laity kept well away from the main activities of the scene, like beastly Tractarian priests keeping the laity away from the holy activities around the altar of the church. The great Victorian critic, John Ruskin, even wrote a pamphlet entitled, "Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds", to suggest that Anglican Evangelicals and High Churchmen should unite to repulse the threat of Rome. The threat at that time was felt to be very real for Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman had just written his declaration entitled, "From out the Flaminian Gate of Rome" in which he claimed that the imminent re-conversion of England to Roman Catholicism would be a jolly good thing.

Ironically, the most consistently Christian of all the Pre-Raphaelite painters was William Holman Hunt and he had a quite different approach to sheep in his paintings! They first appeared in his 1851 painting, "The Hireling Shepherd", which at face value appeared to be a picture of an amorous shepherd dallying with a buxom and obliging country-girl whilst his sheep escaped in all directions. When the city fathers of Manchester acquired the painting in 1897, Holman Hunt explained to them the actual allegorical significance of the painting, namely that it chastised "the type of muddle-headed [clergymen] who, instead of performing their services to their flock - which is in constant peril - discuss with questions of no value to any human soul." And to think that for forty-five years England thought that the painting proved the two principles that "you can't get the staff these days" and that "love's old sweet song sounds the same in every generation"!

When a Mr. Charles Maud saw the painting, he asked Holman Hunt to paint him a copy of the wayward sheep. Conveniently, Holman Hunt had been following the controversy over Millais' "Christ in the House of his Parents" and he had also read Ruskin's pamphlet of "Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds", so he began a new painting which he would entitle, "Our English Coasts" and for which he had in mind the text from Isaiah: All we like sheep have gone astray. Ruskin's pamphlet almost determined Holman Hunt's picture for him, for in it Ruskin had written: Of all the sheep that are fed on the earth, Christ's sheep are the most simple...: always losing themselves; doing little else in the world but lose themselves... Holman Hunt obliged with a picture of sheep wandering on a coastal cliff-edge, painted just east of Hastings in 1852. Most people got the point this time.

In 1853, Holman Hunt completed what is considered to be his masterpiece and which is still regarded as one of the most famous icons of Protestant Art - "The Light of the World". True, it didn't have any sheep in it - well, it was "The Light of the World" and not "The Good Shepherd" - but the sheep were in the back of Holman Hunt's mind, even if they did not appear in this particular canvas! Holman Hunt wanted this celebrated painting to convey a two-fold enlightenment to the mind: first [Ruskin wrote of the symbolism], the light of conscience, which displays past sin, and afterwards the light of peace, the hope of salvation.

The following year, 1854, Holman Hunt's next picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy and it was a picture which the public could not relate to what they imagined of the painter of "The Light of the World". "The Awakening Conscience" was a realistic image of a kept woman rising from the lap, and breaking from the grip, of her lover who is seated at a piano. Holman Hunt intended the painting to be a secular counterpart of "The Light of the World". Here, a fallen woman has realised her past sinfulness and her conscience is driving her away from the darkness of her past and towards the Light depicted in the previous painting. She now realises that we have turned everyone to his own way... she chose the way of luxury purchased at the price of her own virtue. She is just one of the strayed sheep, and in a moment of awakening conscience, she decides to repent and to do something about it.

There are three sections to the text of scripture which is Isaiah 53.6. From 1854 to 1855, Holman Hunt worked on the painting which was to illustrate the remaining third section of the text: and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Like the others, it was painted "from nature", as the Pre-Raphaelites were wont to do. Painting from nature was costly, particularly in the case of "The Light of the World", where Holman Hunt alternately nearly froze to death in a garden in the middle of the night to get the darkness right, or all but asphyxiated himself with a recalcitrant lantern to get its rays as perfect as possible on his canvas. The dangers of painting from nature were even more critical with the painting entitled, "The Scapegoat", because Holman Hunt realised his ambition to travel to the Holy Land and painted the background of the picture on the inhospitable shores of the Dead Sea, close to the site of the biblical city of Sodom. He squatted at his easel at the salt-sea's edge, with a large rifle laid across his knees to deter both wild animals and wandering bandits. It was said that the local Arabs were so impressed by this wildly-bearded, mad Englishman that they asked him if he would like to become their sheikh! The subject of the picture this time was not a sheep but a goat - "The Scapegoat" of the sixteenth chapter of the Book of Leviticus: And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited. In Jewish tradition, on the Day of Atonement, of a pair of goats, one was sacrificed in the temple and the other was ritually and symbolically laden with the sins of all the people and driven out into the wilderness to die. It was an image from the Old Testament not lost on the Christians of subsequent generations, and certainly not lost on Holman Hunt. Here was the archetype of the Christ and of his atoning self-sacrifice on Calvary of which, in Holman Hunt's days, Mrs. Alexander would write her famous hymn containing the lines, "There was no other good enough / To pay the price of sin..."

John Ruskin did not like "The Scapegoat" when it was first exhibited. He wrote initially: "I acknowledge the good purpose of this picture, yet inasmuch as there is no good hair painting, nor hoof painting in it, I hold it to be good only as an omen, not as an achievement." Much later however, in his lectures of 1883, Ruskin explained to his audience the place of "The Scapegoat" as the logical development of Holman Hunt's Christian ideas which had begun with what he called "the first of Hunt's sacred paintings" - "Our English Coasts" of 1852. It is remarkable to realise that the artist took just over three years and four paintings to cover just one verse of scripture from the Old Testament! All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. We think that we know what the text means, don't we? Familiarity with Thomas Cranmer's treatment of the same text from the General Confession in "Morning Prayer" - We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts - does not guarantee that we know what it actually means! Well, that much we know and understand, I suppose. I can acknowledge all my stupid, constant recapitulations of the weaknesses and failings of which I try vainly to divest myself, but to understand what it means when the prophet Isaiah says,"The Lord has laid on him [his only Son, Jesus Christ] the iniquity of us all - that still ultimately defeats me. On the level of pure theological logic, my head can understand what the third section of the verse is claiming, but that is not the same as saying that my heart can encompass its inner truth.

I can only stand like the shocked onlookers at the Royal Academy in 1856 and avert my eyes from the appalling image of "The Scapegoat", not because I am disappointed by its technique but because I am actually seriously frightened by its implications. Like countless Christians before me, I have to return to the image of the face of Christ in Holman Hunt's "The Light of the World" to make any sense of my anxious confusion. What does the face say? In the eyes of the Christ all I can find is some sort of impenetrable assurance that the weight which I would otherwise have to bear into the wilderness upon my own back has already been carried on his, and that this dead-weight has died with him. All I have to do now is to open the door of my heart upon which he is knocking in order to begin to understand the inner truth of the sequence of what Holman Hunt was trying to paint.