I quite often think about this painting, Holman Hunt's vivid and unusual depiction of " The Scapegoat ".

I had a memory of returning to it again and again in The Walker Gallery, Liverpool, which I only discovered recently can't have been right since it was bought from the Walker in 1923 by The Lever gallery.

My own personal fascination with it was due to the vivid colours in such a barren landscape setting which, despite the water present, put me in mind of the moon. After further investigation, it might appear that the picture I was more likely to be staring at so frequently was another version to be found in the Manchester Art Gallery, described as being more vivid than the one I thought I saw in the Walker, but it's also described as small with a rainbow in it, which I don't remember. My abiding memory will be of standing before a large painting of a goat in a barren landscape painted in what to me seemed like psychedelic colours, as if I've mixed the two paintings up somehow without ever having been to the Lever Gallery until fairly recently.

Apparently Ruskin thought it was a terrible painting, commenting that   "Mr Hunt has been blinded by his intense sentiment to the real weakness of the pictorial expression; and in his earnest desire to paint a scapegoat, he has forgotten to ask himself first, whether he could paint a goat at all."  Witty, but rather harsh, since Hunt had surely done a good job considering he had painted in the actual landscape apparently with a gun across his knee incase of bandits. 

Wikipedia cites an amusing anecdote of how Holman Hunt's Belgian picture dealer Gambart didn't want to buy it because he thought it was certain to not be understood by anyone and he would be stuck with it. Set out as a conversation, it describes a conversation between Gambart and Hunt in which Gambart proves to Holman Hunt that it would not be understood, even by English people by inviting his English wife and friend into the studio to view it. Sure enough they didn't mention the story from Leviticus and merely made complimentary comments about the colours. I suppose this might be insinuating that people don't read the Bible, or at least the book of the Bible that this story comes from and that it probably wasn't ever referred to in sermons in churches, either in France or England. 

I wonder why Hunt was so surprised at this ? He himself had only come across the story whilst researching for his painting " The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple " and it seems it must have rocked him to the core since it inspired him to go to Israel and paint the picture in situ. 

As to the colours, Wikipedia also tells us that someone else who was impressed by the "sci-fi book cover " intensity of it was the evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton who wrote after visiting Israel  " 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. " 

William Holman Hunt was painting what he saw. 

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