Docs with images

“THE SHADOW OF DEATH”
Manchester City Art Gallery, UK
by WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT (1827-1910)
Co-Founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

BACKGROUND: William Holman Hunt travelled to the Holy Land to use authentic local models in their natural context in order to capture this painting’s distinctively oriental qualities of light and colour. Its amazingly meticulous detail took three years to complete, from1870 to1873.

Contrasting dramatically with the sublime idealism of sacred persons perfected by Raphael,(a style firmly endorsed by Hunt’s nineteenth century art world,) his Pre-Raphaelite ardour has created a ‘shockingly muscular’ image of Christianity for which nineteenth century British society was not quite ready.

His Jesus is portrayed as a well-weathered, hard-working craftsman-cum-laborer, blissfully stretching for a moment after vigorously sawing wood, the shadow cast by his arms chancing to fall on a foreboding rack of nails, his outline prefiguring the crucifixion. The arch of the window creates a typically Pre-Raphaelite ‘natural ‘halo around his head as opposed to Raphael’s appliquéd gold-leaf embellishments.

His mother Mary is shown devoid of devotional sublimation, depicted in typical Middle-Eastern working-women’s garb, engaged in housewifely diligence, checking on her precious gifts from the Magi which have been saved for thirty years with robust working-class thrift. As the Biblical account makes no reference to her husband Joseph since Christ’s childhood, we may assume she has long been managing for herself and her son as a widow.

An involuntary spasm of recoil surges through her like an electric shock, tensing her arm, spine and foot, making her whole posture rigid. We need no facial expression from her to realise that the pang of the Simeon’s prophecy to her, issued thirty years before, that a “sword of sorrow” shall one day pierce her heart, has lodged its doom-laden portent within her.

Ironically, her son is obliviously at peace, his upcast eyes suggesting his prayerful communing with his Heavenly Father, in a moment of well- earned rest.

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A poem inspired by this painting:

MATER DOLOROSA
(Mother of Sorrows)