Keble College, Oxford

Keble College is primarily an Oxford college, a place of students and tutors, but behind a small door in its chapel hangs one of the best-known religious images of Victorian Britain. William Holman Hunt, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, finished The Light of the World in 1853. Christ stands at night before an overgrown door, holding a lantern and about to knock. The door has no handle, so it can only be opened from inside.

The college was founded in 1870 in memory of John Keble, the clergyman and poet of the Oxford Movement, and its patterned brick buildings and chapel are by the architect William Butterfield. The painting arrived in 1873 as a gift from Martha Combe, widow of Thomas Combe, the university's printer, who had bought it from Hunt. Butterfield would not make room for it in his chapel, so it hung in the library, and only in the 1890s did the architect J. T. Micklethwaite fit out a side chapel for it.

Hunt painted a larger version late in life, which is now in St Paul's Cathedral in London. This one is the original, and a button on the wall beside it switches on a light so visitors can see the lantern glow.