The Scapegoat

In 1854 Holman Hunt travelled to the Holy Land in the middle of a crisis of faith, wanting to paint biblical scenes on the actual ground where they happened. For this one he set up his easel on the salt-crusted shore of the Dead Sea, a place so desolate and dangerous he worked with a gun beside him and a hired guard. The subject comes from Leviticus: a goat driven out into the wilderness carrying the sins of the people. Hunt saw the animal as a figure of Christ, the suffering servant, and he laboured over the caked white salt, the bleached bones and the strange violet mountains until the landscape itself feels like a curse. He couldn't keep a live goat alive out there, so he ended up finishing the animal back in his London studio. There are two versions; this larger one has a pale goat under a heavy sky.