ABSTRACT
In the year 1854 two very different works of religious art were first exhibited. John Martin (1789–1854), who painted and engraved visions of fantastic imagination to illustrate editions of the Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost, closed his career with a trilogy of massive paintings of the Apocalypse (now in the Tate Gallery). They attracted large crowds. Such images of divine judgement were taken seriously by a public that a few years earlier had shown comparable interest in the ‘Apocalyptic Sketches’, lectures on prophecy by a Presbyterian divine John Cumming. 1 In the same year one of the early works of a much younger artist, The Light of the World (now at Keble College, Oxford) by William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) was exhibited at the Royal Academy and initially provoked hostile and dismissive comments. The contrast with Martin’s work could not be more remarkable; the one cosmic, awesome and hostile, the other human in scale, serene and gentle in its setting, even if it carried an underlying disquieting spiritual message. The subsequent history of the paintings contrasted equally dramatically: while Martin’s reputation quickly evaporated, and his apocalyptic pictures were to be sold in 1935 for the derisory sum of seven pounds, Hunt’s painting was to become one of the most familiar and widely reproduced images in the history of art. 2 In the opening years of the twentieth century the aged artist (probably with substantial assistance) painted another copy of the picture (now in St Paul’s Cathedral), which was exhibited to large crowds in numerous parts of the Empire. For Hunt this was a realization of the religious, moral and patriotic purposes that he aimed to fulfil through art: ‘in love of guileless beauty, to lead man to distinguish between that which, being clean in spirit, is productive of virtue, and that which is flaunting and meretricious and productive of ruin to a nation’. 3
