The Scapegoat (painting)

''The Scapegoat'' (1854–1856) is a painting by William Holman Hunt which depicts the "scapegoat" described in the Book of Leviticus. On the Day of Atonement, a goat would have its horns wrapped with a red cloth – representing the sins of the community – and be driven off.

Hunt started painting on the shore of the Dead Sea, and continued it in his studio in London. The work exists in two versions, a small version in brighter colours with a dark-haired goat and a rainbow, in Manchester Art Gallery, and a larger version in more muted tones with a light-haired goat in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight. Both were created over the same period, with the smaller Manchester version being described as "preliminary" to the larger Lady Lever version, which was the one exhibited.

History

In the Royal Academy exhibition catalogue Hunt wrote that "the scene was painted at Sodom, on the margin of the salt-encrusted shallows of the Dead Sea. The mountains beyond are those of Edom."Bronkhurst, Judith, ''Wiliam Holman Hunt, A Catalogue Raisonné'', vol. 1, p.180. He painted most of the work on location in 1854, but completed the work in London in the following year, adding some touches in 1856 before its exhibition at the academy.

The painting was the only major work completed by Hunt during his first trip to the Holy Land, to which he had travelled after a crisis of religious faith. Hunt intended to experience the actual locations of the Biblical narratives as a means to confront the relationship between faith and truth. While in Jerusalem, Hunt had met Henry Wentworth Monk, a millenarian prophet who had distinctive theories about the meaning of the scapegoat and the proximity of the Last Judgement. Monk was particularly preoccupied with Christian Zionism.

Hunt chose a subject derived from the Torah as part of a project to convert Jews to Christianity. He believed that Judaic views of the scapegoat were consistent with the Christian conception of the Messiah as a suffering figure. He wrote to his friend Millais, "I am sanguine that he Scapegoatmay be a means of leading any reflecting Jew to see a reference to the Messiah as he was, and not as they understand, a temporal King."

The Book of Leviticus describes a "scapegoat" which must be ritually expelled from the flocks of the Israelite tribes as part of a sacrificial ritual of cleansing. In line with traditional Christian theology, Hunt believed that the scapegoat was a prototype for the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus, and that the goat represented that aspect of the Messiah described in Isaiah as a "suffering servant" of God. Hunt had the picture framed with the quotations "Surely he hath borne our Griefs and carried our Sorrows; Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of GOD and afflicted." (Isaiah 53:4) and "And the Goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a Land not inhabited." ( Leviticus 16:22)

Critical reception

The reaction to the painting was not as Hunt expected. In his autobiography ''Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood'', Hunt relates the first reaction to the painting by art dealer Ernest Gambart:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in a letter to William Allingham in 1856, called the painting "a grand thing, but not for the public". Ford Madox Brown wrote in his diary: "Hunt's ''Scapegoat'' requires to be seen to be believed in. Only then can it be understood how, by the might of genius, out of an old goat, and some saline encrustations, can be made one of the most tragic and impressive works in the annals of art." Ernest Gambart, as related by Hunt, was less enthusiastic, and was later to remark: "I wanted a nice religious picture and he painted me a great goat." ''The Art Journal'' in 1860, at the time of the exhibition of Hunt's later work '' The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple'', was to characterise the painting as "having disappointed even his warmest admirers".

At the time of the exhibition of ''The Scapegoat'' itself, in 1856, ''The Art Journal'' questioned Hunt's eye for colour in the painting, casting doubt that the mountains of Edom, seen in the background, really were in actual appearance as painted – which Matthew Dennison, writing in ''The Spectator'' in 2008 described the Manchester version as "Day-Glo striations of lilac, crimson and egg-yolk yellow". Dennison suggests the possibility that Hunt was painting the scene from memory, when he was finishing the painting in London after he had returned from his trip to the Dead Sea, and mis-remembered it. Evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton, who saw the painting as a boy and was deeply impressed by the "sci-fi book cover" intensity of it, wrote after visiting Israel that "now on the shores of the Dead Sea I knew that I saw exactly the background I had remembered...if anything more exceptional, more other-worldly, than the painting had made them."pg259-260, "At The World's Crossroads", ''The Collected Papers of W.D. Hamilton: Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Volume 2, Evolution of Sex'' 2001, Hunt's own description of the landscape that he painted is that "never was so extraordinary a scene of beautifully arranged horrible wilderness. It is black, full of asphalte scum and in the hand slimy, and smarting as a sting – No one can stand and say that it is not accursed of God." Art critic Peter Fuller, in 1989, described the landscape of the painting as "a terrible image [...] of the world as a god-forsaken wasteland, a heap of broken images where the sun beats".

References

Further reading

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External links

''William Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat: Rite of Forgiveness/Transference of Blame''

{{DEFAULTSORT:Scapegoat
1856 paintings
Collection of Manchester Art Gallery
Collections of the Lady Lever Art Gallery
Goats in art
Paintings by William Holman Hunt
Paintings depicting Hebrew Bible themes
Water in art
Sun in art
Rainbows in art