Visualising Britain's Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century by Amanda M. Burritt (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Visualising Britain's Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century by Amanda M. Burritt Nabil Matar (bio) Visualising Britain's Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century, by Amanda M. Burritt; pp. xxi + 239. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $54.99, $59.99 paper, $44.99 ebook. The nineteenth century was the Great Age of Christian Mission. From Britain, the superpower of the century, and from other parts of Europe and America, travelers, poets, novelists, theologians, and archaeologists all ventured into the world to preach the gospels. The lands of the Bible, extending from Egypt to Palestine, drew large numbers, especially after the introduction of organized tourism by Thomas Cook. Eager to find evidence of faith in an age of growing uncertainty, Britons (and others) wandered with Bible in hand, as had their forebears for centuries, trying to verify, describe, confirm, and experience the truth of the life of Christ. In her engaging book on three British painters, Visualising Britain's Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century, Amanda M. Burritt, from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia, examines the works of David Roberts, David Wilkie, and William Holman Hunt. These three painters traveled to and in the Holy Land: Roberts in 1838–39, Wilkie in 1840–41, and Hunt, four times, in 1854–55, 1869–72, 1876–78, and [End Page 319] 1892. Burritt studies their paintings in the context of their religious views expressed in their memoirs, correspondence, and other personal documents. Her aim is to show how much the painters reflected, but also helped define, the distinctively Protestant character of Christianity in England and Scotland—a Christianity that treated the Bible as a historical document to be experienced in its sacred geography. Experience is key to Burritt's argument, which is why she focuses on those British painters who traveled and then imagined/depicted scenes from the Bible, rather than on those who simply relied on their readings—as was the case for two of Hunt's fellow Pre-Raphaelites, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. Experience gave legitimacy to scriptural revelation. Although the three painters were quite different in their aesthetics, their denominational backgrounds, and their themes, they all depicted the sites and the peoples they liked to think had not changed since Jesus walked on the Sea of Galilee or in the alleys of Nazareth. Their realism was bold, sometimes audacious: they eschewed idealization, thereby assuring viewers of the historicity of the biblical past. Perhaps most dramatic in this context of authentication was Hunt, who revolutionized the figure of Jesus in British art by moving away from the complex theology of Christianity to the simplicity of Palestinian life. His The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854–60) showed a boy, lost and then found by his parents: a boy, just like a boy next door, being held by his mother. The painting was viewed by thousands of men, women, and children when it toured Britain: it proved by its vivid near-scientific detail that they were taking part in the life of Christ—because Christ and his parents were not very much different from them. In his most famous painting, The Light of the World (1851–53), Hunt showed Jesus knocking on the door of the soul, amidst the luminous colors of an English garden, and holding a lamp, just like the ones still used in Nazareth. When Hunt made another version of The Light (1900), it traveled the world of British colonial and religious presence, from Canada to South Africa. The painting became the emblem of British Protestantism, and Christ became English, as God had been English for Oliver Cromwell, and as Jerusalem had been in England for William Blake. Roberts, Wilkie, and Hunt (and the first two were friends) confronted the uncertainty in Britain after Charles Lyell's and Charles Darwin's works on geology and on evolution by striving to prove the inerrancy of the Bible. As Burritt points out, Britons liked to believe that archaeology confirmed sacred geography—and the painters corroborated exactly that belief. As Wilkie showed John Knox preaching, so did Roberts show the sphinx with camels and local riders, as Hunt...