I suspect that my father showed me The Light of the World in St Paul's Cathedral when I was five, though all I can remember was Nelson's funeral carriage and the heaps of rubble still left from the Luftwaffe's urban replanning efforts a few years earlier. But it has at last caught up with me – in Toronto, of all places – where it has arrived along with the original lantern (made by William Hacking to Hunt's own design) around 1851. There are three versions of the painting; in St Paul's, in Oxford and in Manchester where Bill – who came from Birkenhead – may also have seen it when he was young. Toronto borrowed the Manchester Light and I thought, as I looked at it, that this may be why Bill believed in God. He would repeatedly tell me that this really was what Jesus looked like, complete with halo, beard and long hair, the hand knocking on the cottage door. He would never have known when he first saw it that a woman modelled for Christ – and that his son would spend more than half his life in the one area of the world which obsessed Hunt: the Middle East.
For old Hunt – and by God, he looked old with his huge fluffy white beard in his 83rd year – turns out to have been a committed secular Zionist. By dying in 1910, he missed out on the First World War and the joy of Lloyd George when British, Canadian and other empire troops entered Jerusalem in 1917. "How thrilling was their (singing?) entry into Palestine!" Hunt's widow Edith – sister of his first wife Fanny who died in Italy en route to the Holy Land – trilled. "Will the Jews return think you? How the 'Master' would have rejoiced. I think he does."
Hunt would have rejoiced three decades later. He and his rather mad Canadian friend, Henry Wentworth Monk, were among those Christians who thought that a Jewish homeland could be established in Palestine and that their "return" would inaugurate a thousand years of peace on earth. Both men would have regarded themselves as Christian Zionists of the spiritual rather than imperialist kind, and there is an intriguing essay by Katharine Lochnan in the Art Gallery of Ontario's exhibition book, explaining how both Hunt and Monk were "fuelled by the desire to assist the growing number of Jewish refugees who were victims of Russian pogroms, and to counter the spread of anti-Semitism". Long before Lawrence of Arabia was born, Hunt was agitating for a British intervention in Ottoman Palestine.
He regarded Islam as an iconophobic religion and talked of how Muslims – he differentiated between Turks and Arabs – had a blind spot about looking at things, regarding landscapes as mere places, and paintings as "writing". Nicholas Tromans of Kingston University, London, recalls how Hunt lectured a muezzin in 1855. "When ... I tell him that the Khoran (sic) forbids the representation of living creatures, he seems as much enlightened," Hunt wrote in his diary. Which is not surprising, since the Koran says no such thing. Indeed, there is a painting of the Prophet in a cave in Egypt, a place – along with Lebanon – which had less interest for the Hunt. Arabs, Tromans glumly notes, "cannot participate in the dynamic prophetic capacities to which his art aspired, and ultimately could not be actors in the drama of the transformed Palestine which he imagined".
It gets worse. In a letter to the Daily Chronicle, Hunt explained that he wanted the Turks out of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state to "the full extent of the promised land as indicated to Moses. Only it need not stop there, for ultimately adjacent country might also come under the sway of the Jews". The existing Arab population – which dwarfed the original Jewish inhabitants in the 1850s – had no ambition to be landowners, Hunt decided so could not be called dispossessed by new settlers; the Arabs would remain as labourers, the "hewers of wood and drawers of water" of the Book of Joshua.
Hunt later met Theodore Herzl and appears to have been blind to the divisions within Jewish society in Europe. He saw himself as a settler, albeit a Christian one, in Palestine and lived there in total for more than six years. Along with The Scapegoat, with its geologically accurate portrait of the distant mountains of Palestine, and The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (in which the temple looks a bit like a mosque), Hunt did acknowledge the Arab and Muslim majority of the land. There is a lovely painting of Nazareth with its square houses and white minaret and I warmed to a picture of the Es Sakhra mosque in Jerusalem during Ramadan, a dark-blue cloak of sky hanging over the lights of the buildings and the distant torches lighting the iftah fast-breaking. But the Arabs themselves are painted as roughly, unimportant figures in veils whose faces are rarely seen. In Cairo, Hunt boasted that he once tore a veil from a woman who wanted to model for him. There is a painting from his Cairo visit (The Lantern-Maker's Courtship) of a man trying to do just that to his would-be fiancée. But in Palestine, as one reviewer put it in Canada, "he seems to have regarded the Arabs as transients who would gladly step aside".
True, Hunt blathered on a lot about world peace, blissfully unaware of the conflicts which would consume his painted Palestine. I fear it all puts The Light of the World into a different context. The cottage upon which Jesus knocks is supposed to be the threshold of the human heart. I'm glad someone had the good sense to keep the door tightly shut.
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