Pre-Raphaelite of the world

Had there been a poll of the nation’s favourite painting 100 years ago, the front runner would almost certainly have been William Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’. Its representation of a crowned and bearded figure, knocking at a door that is obstructed by thorns and dead flowers, was a sermon in paint. Viewers were expected to piece together its symbolic references and arrive at the idea of a suppliant Christ, offering to redeem the world with the light of his salvation, even as he meekly awaits admittance by each individual. As well as being a work of faithful naturalism, painstakingly recorded during chilly moonlit nights in the Surrey countryside, it is an image profoundly in tune with the proselytising zeal of Victorian evangelism.

Back in 1906-7, against a gathering current of more radical impulses in modern art, Hunt’s image was taking the world by storm. A larger version of his original picture began to tour the colonies, starting in Canada, before heading south to Australia and New Zealand. In Sydney alone, it was seen by 302,183 visitors in 25 days. On its return to London, it was placed in St Paul’s Cathedral, where the artist stipulated that it ‘be freely accessible to the public without payment’.

Those years marked the zenith of Hunt’s appeal, for, like his Pre-Raphaelite brethren John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hunt’s reputation afterwards plummeted, like dodgy stock, throughout the middle of the 20th century. Valiant work was done to revive interest at the end of the 1960s, including a large exhibition at Liverpool, organised by Mary Bennett, and the racy-sounding biography My Grandfather, His Wives and Loves by Diana Holman Hunt. But since then it has been almost 20 years since the last full account of his career. This neglect seems unjust, especially as both Millais and Rossetti have continued to sustain very public profiles.