When the English Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt was travelling in Egypt in 1854 he was encouraged to grow a beard. With full imperial bluster he wrote to fellow Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, âI should not do so ⊠if I found it disguised my nationality, for that is worth every other pretension one travels with; it finds one in cringing obedience and fear from every native, even a dog when told one is an Englishman runs away yelping. With this nationality, indeed, and a fist I would undertake to knock down any two Arabs in the Usbeykia and walk away unmolested.â1 In fact the reality of Huntâs interactions with the Near East and those of his compatriots was far more complex and nuanced than this arrogant assertion suggests and he did, eventually, grow a beard!
British engagement with the region of the Near East in the nineteenth century was multi-faceted and part of its complexity is exemplified in the powerful relationship between developing and diverse Protestant theologies, visual culture and imperial identity. Britainâs Holy Land was visualised through pictorial representation, internal conception and metaphysical vision. As we explore we will see that this Holy Land of the mind is manifested in the visual expressions of biblical land, biblical history and biblical typology.
Throughout the nineteenth century there was a demonstrable interrelationship between the complex milieu of British religious belief and practice, the ideology and exercise of British exploration, commerce, politics and archaeology in the Near East and the visual expression of these interests. Most significantly, underpinning this dynamic, the Holy Land, with Jerusalem at its heart, was viewed in multiple ways: as a region of both physical and spiritual geography, a timeless and metaphorical place, quintessentially âotherâ, yet historical home of the Christian faith. It was viewed as the inheritance of Britain and the place of eschatological promise, a place of ethnographic interest and commercial and political importance.2
This multilayered, sometimes ambiguous and seemingly contradictory engagement was the thread linking all the strands of nineteenth-century British interaction with the land they called holy.
This is not an art history book but the British artists David Roberts, David Wilkie and William Holman Hunt make excellent case studies through which to explore Britainâs relationship to the Holy Land because each professed a Protestant faith, each travelled to the area and each wrote about their journeys and beliefs, as well as depicted the region and its peoples through a British Christian lens. Their artworks and writings enable an examination of engagement with the Holy Land from the 1830s to the 1890s. Roberts, Wilkie and Hunt reacted to their changing social and intellectual contexts and subsequently their work influenced British visual and religious culture, as well as being shaped by it. Living, travelling and painting at different times within this period, Roberts, Wilkie and Hunt produced artworks that differed vastly in technique, style and specific subject matter, although all three were inspired by journeys through the same places. In the nineteenth century, a British Protestant religious art evolved which grew from both reclamation of the physical Holy Land and the privileging of personal experience.
Broad generalisations are frequently made about the nature of Protestant religious art in the nineteenth century, but to really understand such work it is crucial to acknowledge significant differences in artistsâ beliefs and attitudes to faith considered through the lens of shifting theological thinking at the time. Artists who worked in the Holy Land had their own understandings of religion and the Bible, often reflecting and illuminating significant theological differences in the Established and Dissenting churches. The writing and artworks of Roberts, Wilkie and Hunt clearly show that while each artist was inspired by the Bible, Roberts focused on the landscape of âsacred geographyâ, Wilkie sought to depict Biblical narratives in âauthenticâ historical settings and Hunt developed sophisticated typological symbolism in his work. Their work provoked critical and popular response, leading to further engagement with contemporary issues around both Christology and the significance of the Holy Land for Britain.
Through close reading of visual and textual sources, it is evident that a more nuanced interpretation of their differing theological understandings than is often suggested is necessary to truly appreciate the intention behind the artworks they produced as a result of their Holy Land travels. Key to this understanding is the argument that a new Protestant visual rhetoric developed based on personal experience of the Holy Land. Religious thinking evolved in nineteenth-century Britain as the physical landscape of the Holy Land was rediscovered.
The life contexts, letters, journals and visual evidence of Wilkie, Roberts and Hunt suggest sincere religious motivation in their various attempts to depict the Palestine of their day as the land of the Bible. The nineteenth-century developments of High, Broad and Low Church Anglican theologies and Dissenting Protestant positions, and the influences of these perspectives on belief and worship, are fundamental to a deep understanding of much painting produced at the time. The importance, or otherwise, of personal faith and belief as necessary for the sincerity of religious art was considered a very real issue during this period.
To engage with the Bible meaningfully in this intellectual and cultural environment, Roberts, Wilkie and Hunt sought to put themselves literally in the places where, according to Christian scripture, Jesus had walked. Their resulting paintings allowed the viewer in Britain to see from this sacred perspective too. For many Victorian Protestants this approach allowed them to view Palestine as the âHoly Landâ without being required to accept the traditional identification of shrines and other places historically associated with pilgrimage, ritual and relics, things which were, for them, most definitely part of Roman Catholic and Orthodox belief and practice. To view a painting of a hill, a town or a river which Jesus also had seen allowed an imagined immediacy unmediated by ecclesiastical and clerical intervention. As we will see in subsequent chapters, many paintings reflected this complex thinking.
Roberts, Wilkie and Hunt lived and worked in interrelated and interdependent religious, cultural, political and scientific contexts both in Britain and whilst journeying in the physical and cultural environment of the Near East. Roberts and Wilkie were both brought up in the religious, intellectual and political environment and values of Scottish Presbyterianism. Based on an analysis of his own writing, it is evident that Roberts was motivated by both a fascination for the Bible lands and a keen sense of the economic and professional opportunities they could provide an artist.
In exploring these ideas, published and edited letters and journals are crucial sources but they need to be used with an awareness of the challenges they can provide in attempting to seek veracity and to avoid overly selective use of available material. Much traditional history writing has focussed on the significant deeds of powerful people, usually men, âa view from aboveâ.3 In exploring nineteenth-century Britainâs developing relationship with the lands of the Bible, it is important to consider the implications of decisions, actions and views of significant influential individuals but in the context of the developing engagement of âordinaryâ people with the Holy Land, âa view from belowâ. Such impacts are evident when a variety of primary and secondary, textual and visual sources are investigated from a range of perspectives.
When analysing artworks the rhetorical devices used in âvisual persuasionâ need to be evaluated, taking into consideration the perspective of both artists and observers.4 It is necessary to understand the combination of context, situation, intention and perspective when gauging the primary purpose of an artwork.5 We need to ask whether the purpose of the work is more than the visual aesthetic. The anthropologist Geertz defines culture as âan historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life.â6 This definition is extremely useful when considering the creation and reception of the complex relationship between visual symbolism and theological concepts in nineteenth-century Britain.
The idea of learned cultural specificity seems particularly relevant to nineteenth-century British interaction with the Near East. Rhetoric, including the visual, is contextualised through particular individual and national experiences and values which lead to specific âways of seeingâ.7 Visual images can powerfully shape how we perceive others and what we think we know about them. Historical images can communicate important information to us today, including information about attitudes, behaviours and values.8 In order to draw reasonable conclusions from specific sources it is imperative to engage with the complexity and multiplicity of small details.9
To avoid the trap of anachronistic interpretation and the attribution of twenty-first-century values and ideas to nineteenth-century artists, in the analysis of artwork, journals and letters, we need to take into account the importance of Baxandallâs notion of the âperiod eyeâ. By this he means recognition that certain ways of seeing, perceiving and recording are socially, culturally and historically contextualised and involve specific understandings evident to those within such contexts. Roberts, Wilkie and Hunt interpreted their experiences through the cognitive frameworks that their culture and society had taught them; hence their interpretations of the sights they saw in the Holy Land drew on their pre-existing, and culturally specific, knowledge and values.10 On the basis of their artworks, journals, letters and Huntâs memoir it can be argued that none of the three artists had an overtly political agenda but that each was motivated by a mixture of personal religious beliefs, desire for new experiences, artistic ambition and, to varying degrees, an astute awareness of the commercial market in Britain for visual images of the Holy Land.
It is also necessary to guard against the type of circular argument in visual interpretation which can occur when attempts are made to use artworks as evidence of particular ideological positions.11 We must avoid interpreting a painting, Huntâs The Light of the World (Appendix Fig. A.â1), for insta...