A converted British family hides a missionary from persecution by the Druids

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A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids (William Holman Hunt)
A Converted British Family
Sheltering a Christian Missionary
from the Persecution of the Druids
William Holman Hunt , 1849-1850
Oil on canvas
111 × 141 cm
Ashmolean Museum , Oxford, England

A converted British family hides a missionary from persecution by the Druids (English: A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids ) is a painting by William Holman Hunt , which in the 1850 Royal Academy was issued and now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford .

theme

Hunt's painting shows a family of island celts living in a crude hut on the riverbank. You are caring for a missionary who is hiding from a group of pagan British Celts . On the left, in the background outside the half-open hut, a druid can be seen who, with his outstretched arm, seems to be calling on a mob to seize another missionary who is trying to escape his pursuers. The scene outside does not escape the family inside the hut either. A stone circle is visible behind the missionary through the window. The contrast between Christian and Druidic symbols is made clear by the cross painted in red on a wall inside the hut.

The presence of the druids means that the time the painting is intended to depict can be narrowed down to the middle of the 1st century, when the Romans conquered the British island. The liturgical vestments, however, point to a later date.

reception

Florence Claxton: The Choice of Paris: An Idyll (1860), a satire on the picture

The painting is compared to John Everett Millais ' Christ in the House of His Parents . Both artists tried to depict episodes from early Christian history. Hunt was always criticized for the strange composition and the distorted poses of the characters. In 1860 Florence Claxton parodied The Choice of Paris: An Idyll Hunt's work. Other works by the Pre-Raphaelites also took up the painting. The hut, for example, shows similarities with the work The Maiden's Time of the Virgin Mary by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which was created at the same time .

Hunt himself considered it his best work, as he also wrote in 1872 in a letter to Edward Lear regarding the painting.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Judith Bronkhurst: William Holman Hunt. A catalog raisonné . Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 134-136
  2. ^ William E. Fredeman: Pre-Raphaelites in Caricature: " The Choice of Paris". To Idyll by Florence Claxton . In: Burlington Magazine , Vol. 102 (December 1960), pp. 523-529.
  3. ^ Günter Metken and others: Pre-Raphaelites . Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden 1973, p. 76

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