William Holman Hunt

In 1854 William Holman Hunt set up an easel on the salt-crusted shore of the Dead Sea, a rifle beside him against bandits, and tried to paint a goat standing in the actual landscape of the Bible. The animal was the scapegoat of the Book of Leviticus, driven into the wilderness carrying the sins of the people, which Hunt read as a forerunner of Christ. He went through several goats, which kept dying in the punishing heat, and finished the picture back in London.

That literal-mindedness was the whole programme. In 1848 Hunt, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais, had founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young English painters who rejected the smooth formulas taught by the Royal Academy and wanted to paint everything directly from nature, in sharp detail and bright colour.

Of the three founders Hunt was the one who never wavered from that creed. His religious pictures made him rich and popular. The Light of the World, a lamp-lit Christ knocking at an overgrown door, was toured around the British Empire and copied in countless churches. He was nearly blind at the end, and dictated a two-volume history of the Brotherhood that fixed his own version of how it all began.