The Light of the World

Holman Hunt worked on this at night by lamplight in the early 1850s, when he and a few young friends had just launched the Pre-Raphaelite movement in protest against what they saw as the slick, empty painting of their day. Christ stands at an overgrown door, lantern in hand, from the line in Revelation about knocking and waiting to be let in. The detail everyone eventually notices is that the door has no handle on the outside. It can only be opened from within, which was Hunt's entire point, and he insisted the omission was deliberate. Weeds and brambles choke the threshold, so no one has answered in a long time. The original lantern he painted from still sits in the chapel at Keble College beside the picture.