“THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD”

3. FROM THE TIMES, May 5, 1854

To the Editor of the “Times”

SIR,-I trust that, with your usual kindness and liberality, you will give me room in your columns for a few words respecting the principal Pre-Raphaelite picture in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy this year. Its painter is travelling in the Holy Land, and can neither suffer nor benefit by criticism. But I am solicitous that justice should be done to his work, not for his sake, but for that of the large number of persons who, during the year, will have an opportunity of seeing it, and on whom, if rightly understood, it may make an impression for which they will ever afterwards be grateful.

I speak of the picture called “The Light of the World,” by Mr. Holman Hunt.¹ Standing by it yesterday for upwards of an hour, I watched the effect it produced upon the passers-by. Few stopped to look at it, and those who did almost invariably with some contemptuous expression, founded on what appeared to them the absurdity of representing the Saviour with a lantern in his hand. Now, it ought to be remembered that, whatever may be the faults of a Pre-Raphaelite picture, it must at least have taken

¹ [“The Light of the World” is well known from the engraving of it by W. H. Simmons. It was originally purchased by Mr. Thomas Combe, of Oxford, who bequeathed it (subject to the life interest of his widow) to Keble College; she, however, presented it at once to the College, where it now hangs in the side-chapel, having been removed there in 1894 from the library. In Ruskin’s diary he notes that the price paid was 400 guineas. For other references to the picture, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. iii. §§ 9, 23, ch. iv. § 20, ch. vi. § 8, and Appendix 3, in which passages it is cited as an original and imaginative work of ideal religious art, perfect alike in execution and feeling; vol. iv. ch. iv. § 8 n., where a part of this letter is cited; Academy Notes, 1856, s. 413; 1875, s. 196; Eagle’s Nest, § 115 (“the most true and useful piece of religious vision which realistic art has yet embodied”); and The Art of England, § 6.]

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