The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple

Most painters had shown this Gospel scene, the boy Jesus found questioning the elders in the temple, as a purely imagined moment. Holman Hunt wanted it to look like something that had actually happened in Jerusalem. In 1854 he sailed to the Holy Land determined to get the setting, the faces, and the customs right, hiring local people as models and studying Jewish ritual for the details of the temple. It did not go smoothly. Models came and went, the work stalled, and he set it aside to paint another picture in the desert before finally finishing back in England in 1860, six years after he started. The result is packed with worked-out detail, from the rich fabrics to the doves brought for sacrifice, each thing meant to be as close to first-century Jerusalem as he could reconstruct it.