William Holman Hunt: Layered Belief in the Art of a Pre-Raphaelite Realist

Abstract The essay is concerned with the evolving religious beliefs of the British Pre-Raphaelite painter, William Holman Hunt (1827–1910). Hunt’s faith was forged by his early connection and friendships with members and patrons of the High Anglican Oxford Movement and transformed by his repeated trips to the fraught religious environment of nineteenth-century Syria, the name generally used at the time to denote modern Israel. His contacts with urban and agrarian Jews, Christians, and Muslims, with officials in the Anglican, Byzantine, and Lutheran Churches, and with British colonial officials turned both him and his art in more universalistic directions from his former parochial British colonial/elitist global understanding.