ABSTRACT
The advent of public art galleries from the 1830s, coupled with educational advance and religious change, presented opportunities for large moralising pictures. Wesley’s descriptive writing in his published ‘Journal’ helped painters to visualise particular scenes as symbolic of his ministry and message. Numbers of these date from the middle years of the nineteenth century including those by Henry Perlee Parker, Marshall Claxton, William Geller, George Washington Brownlow. Often large steel engravings were made of these, which typically hung in Victorian homes and chapels, becoming formative images around an evangelistic and moral mythology of Wesley. In the early twentieth-century paintings by William Hatherell and W.H.Y. Titcomb added to this.
