William Holman Hunt

William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) was born in Cheapside in the City of London, the son of a warehouse manager. Rejected at first by the Royal Academy schools, he eventually entered them, and in 1848, after meeting Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with Rossetti and John Everett Millais. Of all its members, he stayed truest to its ideals throughout his career. His paintings are marked by close detail, vivid colour and elaborate symbolism, shaped by the writings of Ruskin and Carlyle. His early work was attacked in the art press, but religious painting made his name, beginning with The Light of the World, now at Keble College, Oxford. In the mid-1850s he travelled to the Holy Land in search of accurate settings for biblical subjects, painting The Scapegoat and The Shadow of Death there, and he later built a house in Jerusalem. Failing eyesight finally ended his painting, and in 1905 he was appointed to the Order of Merit. Here: The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, one of the pictures he painted in the Holy Land.