The story · 4 min read
He can knock. Only someone inside can open it.
The Light of the World, 1853. William Holman Hunt. Keble College, Oxford.
Look closer
7 things to notice
101
He is looking at you
The lantern lights his face from below, and he looks past the door, straight out of the picture, calm and sad. Hunt built this face from many people: a clay model, his own father, Millais, John Capper, and Thomas Carlyle, whom he studied in person, secretly. Hunt confirmed that the poet Christina Rossetti also sat for it, after he had settled its male character.
02
Thorns wound through gold
A pale yellow halo glows behind his head, and on top of it a crown of thorns is twisted around a gold crown. He wears both at once, as if the king and the sufferer were the same man standing out here in the dark.
03
The knock not yet made
His right hand comes out of the green sleeve and rises to the edge of the door, then stops. The picture illustrates Revelation 3:20, in which Christ says he stands at the door and knocks. Hunt paints the instant before the knock.
04
A door that opens only from inside
Look for the handle: there isn't one. Ivy climbs the weathered planks, and the door can only be opened from the inside. The handleless door has been read as a mind that stubbornly stays shut, and the man outside can knock but cannot let himself in.
05
Nobody has come this way in a long time
Brambles on red stems grow thickly across the foot of the door, and dry, straw-coloured stalks stand in front of it. Nobody could have opened this door without tearing them away. It has been shut a long time.
06
He came after dark
Just above the halo, a small dark winged shape, probably a bat, crosses the green sky. It is deep in the night, and he has come anyway. One account says Hunt painted the picture at night too, in a makeshift hut at Worcester Park Farm in Surrey.
07
A light he brought himself
An ornate lantern hangs on a chain from his left hand, pierced with stars, with a warm flame showing through its arched panels. Its light falls in a bright yellow patch across his green robe. It seems the title of the painting hangs from his hand: he carries the light to the door himself.
Our take
The Light of the World shows Christ at night, about to knock on a door that has not been opened in a long time. William Holman Hunt took it from Revelation 3:20, where Christ says he stands at the door and knocks. But look at the door again: it has no handle. He can knock, but only someone inside can open it.
And he isn't looking at the door. He looks out of the picture at whoever stands in front of it, calm and a little sad, as if he has waited at many doors like this one. Hunt said he painted it because he believed he had a divine command to, not just because it was a good subject. He has done everything he can. The rest happens on the other side of the door.
The painter's moment
1827–1910Painted it at 26Pre-Raphaelite
Hunt was about 26 in 1853, the year the painting is dated. In 1848, after meeting the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he had founded the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and the critics had attacked his first works as clumsy and ugly. He began this picture around 1849 or 1850 and kept it going alongside others: The Hireling Shepherd in 1851, and The Awakening Conscience in 1853, a scene of modern life. He finished it in 1854 and showed it at the Royal Academy that year. Religious paintings made him famous, beginning with this one. In the mid-1850s he went to the Holy Land for accurate scenery and local detail, and there painted The Scapegoat, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple and The Shadow of Death.
Martha Combe, widow of Thomas Combe, Printer to the University of Oxford, gave the painting to Keble College, expecting it to hang in the chapel. The chapel's architect, William Butterfield, was against it and left no place for it, so from 1878 it hung in the new library, until J. T. Micklethwaite built a side chapel for it in 1892–1895. It hangs there still. Keble charged visitors a fee to see it, and that pushed Hunt to paint a life-sized version late in life, which he finished with Edward Robert Hughes's help as he grew frail and suffered from glaucoma. Charles Booth bought it, and it was hung in St Paul's Cathedral; on its world tour of 1905–1907, it was claimed that four-fifths of Australia saw it. Engraved copies found their way onto the walls of nurseries, schools and churches, and for many it was the most important picture of Christ of its day.
In its time
The Light of the World was painted in 1853, when Hunt was 26. Where it stands on Art Through Time:
Its colors
Elsewhere in the world
- 1848Revolutions across EuropeRealists paint workers and the poor.
- 1848The Seneca Falls ConventionThe first women's rights convention demands the vote.
- 1850The Taiping RebellionSome 20 million die in China's civil war.
- 1853Japan opens to the WestJapanese prints astonish European painters.
- 1857The Uprising of 1857Indian soldiers and rulers rise against the Company; the Mughal court ends.
The facts
- Title
- The Light of the World
- Artist
- William Holman Hunt (1827–1910)
- Date
- 1853
- Original medium
- Oil on canvas
- Style
- Pre-Raphaelite
- Made in
- United Kingdom
- Collection
- Keble College, Oxford
Living with it
The mood
Hushed and nocturnal, with something waiting in it. It brings a room down to the quiet of a chapel at night: one lamp, one door, a hand raised. Not gloomy, but watchful.
The palette
Almost all of it is night: damson, umber and a violet so dark it is nearly black. The russet of the old door warms the left side, and the parchment glow of the lantern, the halo and the dry stalks is what you see from across a room.
Who it finds
- Anyone who has waited a long time for someone to open up, and kept knocking.
- People who have kept a door shut for years, and wonder now and then who is still standing outside it.
- Anyone who grew up with this picture on a classroom or church wall, and wants to see it properly at last.
See it in a room
Your photo is never uploaded, and it's gone when you leave.
From across a room it reads as a tall, dark doorway with one warm light low inside it and a pale ring of gold above: the lantern and the halo. The canvas is 125 by 60 centimetres, more than twice as tall as it is wide, so it stands rather than spreads. Up close, the night fills with things to find: the thorns wound through the gold crown, the stars cut into the lantern, the brambles at the foot of the door, the bat, and the handle that isn't there.
Its shape suits narrow places: between two windows, beside a real door, at the turn of a stair, in a hallway or a study, or in a corner kept for prayer or quiet. Give it height, enough that you can see from where you stand that the handle is missing.
How we make it
- True to the original
- Each file is color-matched to the museum original. If the color isn't right, we print it again, with our compliments.
- On canvas
- Fine-art canvas hand-stretched over a ¾″ solid-wood frame, with mirrored edges so nothing is lost.
- In our floating frame
- Our stretched canvas set in a slim floating frame, with a shadow gap so the painting seems to hover.
- As a framed print
- Archival pigment print on museum-grade cotton paper, in a solid-wood frame with UV-protective glazing.
- Ready to hang on arrival
- It arrives with the hanging hardware attached. No framer, no guesswork.
- Perfect on arrival
- If anything arrives damaged or not as you ordered, send us a photo within 7 days of delivery and we'll make it again, with our compliments.
Hunt dated him 1853, and his hand has been raised to that door ever since. Give him a quiet wall to wait beside.
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