A Tale of Two Centres? Representing Palestine to the British in the Nineteenth Century

Mobilities ISSN: 1745-0101 (Print) 1745-011X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmob20 A Tale of Two Centres? Representing Palestine to the British in the Nineteenth Century Simon Coleman To cite this article: Simon Coleman (2007) A Tale of Two Centres? Representing Palestine to the British in the Nineteenth Century, Mobilities, 2:3, 331-345, DOI: 10.1080/17450100701597301 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17450100701597301 Published online: 24 Oct 2007. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 285 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rmob20 Mobilities Vol. 2, No. 3, 331–345, November 2007 A Tale of Two Centres? Representing Palestine to the British in the Nineteenth Century SIMON COLEMAN Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK ABSTRACT This paper describes the work of Victorian artists and writers as they mediated between a political and cultural centre (Britain) and a religious centre (the Holy Land). It is therefore as much about symbolically and religiously ‘central’ landscapes that travel (in texts and images) as it is about travellers who recreate such landscapes. The paper aims to describe and analyse the re-contextualisation of landscape as it becomes a moving and translated, rather than a fixed, point of reference – in effect creating sacred journeys where lands, rather than just people, are mobile. KEY WORDS: Landscape, art, sacred journeys, Victorians, Holy Land Introduction: The Gun and the Brush When the Victorian artist and traveller William Holman Hunt described the methods of painting that he had used in the Near East, he famously portrayed himself as equipped with a paintbrush in one hand, and a gun in the other (Casson, 1984, p. 13).1 If the brush was meant to capture likenesses of landscapes reminiscent of past, particularly biblical, times, the weapon was meant to keep away the contemporary inhabitants of such lands. Hunt’s awareness of the iconic status of this image of artist as warrior was demonstrated by a self portrait he sent to a friend of himself engaged in painting in the Near East,2 showing the artist in the foreground and the Egyptian pyramids in the background. It was also commemorated in a remarkable photograph he had taken of himself posing in the garden of his London home, many years after his first visit to the Holy Land, holding a gun and brush and re-enacting the painting of one of his most famous pictures: that of The Scapegoat, which had originally been created on the shores of the Dead Sea. Hunt stares at the camera, still sporting the luxuriant beard he grew to look ferocious while travelling through Palestine in 1854 (Holman Hunt, 1969, p. 142), hunched forward in an Correspondence Address: Simon Coleman, Department of Anthropology, Arts C, University of Sussex, Brighton, Sussex, BN3 5RD, UK. Email: s.m.coleman@sussex.ac.uk 1745-0101 Print/1745-011X Online/07/030331–15 # 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17450100701597301 332 S. Coleman attitude of art as hard labour. Each of these objects – the brush, the gun, the sketch and the photo, not to mention the painting itself – can be seen as forming technologies of travel3 (and representations of travel) that both expressed and facilitated Victorian involvement with the Near East. The ambivalences contained within such movement and its technologies are also on display in this panoply of the militant artist: the brush as an instrument of engaged creation as opposed to the destructive, distancing powers of the gun; the claim of having made the journey in person, juxtaposed with its embodied and pictorial re-enactment in a British garden, separated from the original by both space and time; even the evidential quality of the painting compared with and validated by the alternative exactitude of the photograph as witness of Hunt’s sacred calling as both artist and traveller. As one of the most famous of the group of Pre-Raphaelite artists who took the European and to some extent the North American world by storm from the midnineteenth century on, Hunt combined an idiosyncratic evangelicalism with an astute awareness of the potential value of travel to his career.4 If he felt his Britishness keenly while abroad, he was also fond of wearing Arab clothes in England (Marsh 1996, p. 87), and this sense of physically translating the Holy Land to and for others was an important part of his calling as artist and Christian. It is also vital to the focus of this paper, which is concerned with some of the ways in which Palestine (a religious centre) was represented and translated to Britain (a cultural, economic and political centre) during the nineteenth century. While Kenny’s contribution to this volume shows how Mecca is ‘gifted’ across transnational space through complex, metonymic, links established between a pilgrimage shrine and other Muslim sites, the representations with which I am concerned appeared as more explicitly commercial forms – paintings, books – made available to a more anonymous public, and yet they often required modes of engagement that transcended those of mere market transactions. Thus both Kenny and I deal with (very different forms of) religiously oriented travel, constituted through people, texts and other objects that have their own transcultural mobilities and trajectories. In my case, the contexts to be examined include not merely the desert landscapes depicted by Hunt, but also the wider, burgeoning world of travel and mobility that influenced the Victorian public and its artists, even if many citizens never ventured beyond Britain. Hunt could easily be dismissed as a prime embodiment of a dogged Orientalism in his numerous dealings with, and representations of, the Middle East. But he also epitomises some of the ambiguities of the interaction between British Protestantism and ‘the East’ during a period when Western visitors were exploring the Holy Lands. Some of these ambiguities, as we have seen, are contained in the image of the armed artist, engaged in an act of simultaneous production and repulsion. Hunt is therefore emblematic for this paper in a more complex sense than a simple indictment of his Orientalism might imply. He was one among many religious travellers through the region who perceived the task of re-invoking its landscape in words and images for others ‘at home’ as a crucial, sometimes sacralising, corollary of the art and task of travelling. In this role he provides a curious prefiguration of Urry’s (2000) discussions of contemporary, ‘imaginative travel’, where people are exposed to the possibilities of imagining ‘elsewhere’ through images of place and people through such media as television. Artists and writers in the nineteenth century could not use electronic, moving images, but they could attempt to engage increasingly literate and Representing Palestine to the British in the Nineteenth Century 333 relatively wealthy populations in the alluring ‘prospects’ of previously distant worlds that seemed, in an increasingly mobile economic and cultural environment, to be coming ever closer. Such travellers often looked in at least two proselytising directions, towards the potential transformation of the inhabitants of the so-called ‘desolate land’5 but also towards the edification – even conversion – of those who could only make the journey there through the pages and illustrations of a book or a picture. A parallel can be drawn here with Mitchell’s (1994, p. 17) notion of the ‘double movement’ of European imperial landscape, which directs its ‘progressive’ expansion not only towards foreign fields but also towards a reshaping and re-imagining of the landscape of the imperial centre. For travellers, conveying relevant ‘truths’ involved a negotiation between demands for exact naturalistic description on the one hand, and theological requirements to present powerful religious experiences that would engage the vicarious consumers of texts or images on the other. As Protestants, they also had to resolve the problem of whether they could invest their visits and their depictions with sacramental qualities without thereby falling into the supposedly idolatrous practices of Roman Catholics or the Orthodox (though the model of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was well known.). Thus David Morgan has recently6 noted in relation to the reception of visual media in the nineteenth-century US that Protestants might have shied away from Catholic notions of grace connected with images, but pictures of the sacred could still be regarded as more than arbitrary signs through the shared imaginings and forms of pious gaze that they helped to cultivate within potentially like-minded religious publics. In common with Urry’s ‘tourist gaze’, the ‘pious gaze’ can be seen as a form of ordering of experience, but – as will become evident later on – it also raises specific questions concerning the relationship between the gaze and co-presence, not merely with fellow viewers in the gallery or hall, but also with the artist and even the sacred figures invoked by landscapes of the Holy Land. My paper is therefore as much about symbolically and religiously ‘central’ landscapes that travel (in texts and images) as it is about travellers who recreate such landscapes.7 I am describing the re-contextualisation of landscape as it becomes a moving and translated, rather than a fixed, point of reference – in effect creating sacred journeys where lands, rather than just people, are mobile. Elsewhere (Coleman & Crang, 2002; cf. Lury, 1997) I have referred to the notion of ‘performing’ and mobilising places through touristic practices, and here I amplify this theme through examining the constitution and ‘dispersal’ of sacred places in the context of relations between Victorian Britain and the Holy Land. My depiction of a mobile landscape is meant to convey the sense of images and words commodified in books and paintings, but also the Protestant unease with any single place as fixed icon. Such unease, I shall argue, could be partially mitigated by re-localisations that contained within them ways of suggesting to viewers or readers how to position themselves not only in relation to, but also within, moving landscapes. Such movement pointed to and yet diffused the intensity of the sacred centre, thus indicating the ubiquity of religious experience, even as it drew on a specifically biblical landscape as experiential catalyst.8 So the landscapes I am describing were constantly reconstructed within and beyond the Holy Land itself. My argument points to a dynamic and troubled 334 S. Coleman relationship between representation and experience, in which the production and consumption of images of landscape – filtered through Protestant sensibilities – suggest the possibility of reconstituting, sometimes even challenging, certain Western assumptions about the cultural, moral and aesthetic distance between Europe and the East. Distant Prospects During the 1830s, the Holy Land was the theme of some 40 travel books a year (Howe, 1997, p. 22; Coleman, 2002). At a time when tourism was becoming more available to the middle classes, it provided a popular destination for pilgrims, artists and other travellers, who took advantage of the increased accessibility of the area created by the opening of the Suez Canal and the establishment of the British Protectorate in Egypt. The region also, of course, provided an important geopolitical and economic link between Britain and the Indian sub-continent. Literary, academic and political luminaries were frequent visitors, but a more common type of British visitor was a clergyman, usually broad church or evangelical in orientation, well-educated, often accompanied by family and friends (Hummel & Hummel, 1995, p. 5). At the background to much of such travel were echoes of the European Grand tour. However, for a public still passionately interested in origins, the Near East provided a unique connection with the emergence of Christianity, while also posing the question of how the Semitic culture of the present related to its biblical past. This was a period when it was still frequently assumed that the land could be ‘read’ like a text, as product and proof of the divine, just as travellers regularly opened their Bibles to read about the landscapes towards which they were simultaneously directing their gaze. How, then, was the land ‘read’ by Protestant visitors? Lock (2002) has argued for a key opposition between distance and proximity in such pilgrims’ orientation towards the archaeological and sacred sites encountered. He notes that the distant prospect, arranged according to rules of perspective, could constitute the precise position from which it might best, or most properly, be seen, in other words lending the viewer mastery, possession, optical propriety. By contrast, says Lock, to prostrate oneself in relation to a site – or a sight – was to be vulnerable, to surrender distance and optical mastery in order to attain proximity to the sacred object. Such an opposition between the optic and the haptic expressed Victorian Protestant anxieties not only about colonial mastery but also about the presence of rival Catholic and Orthodox understandings of accessing divinity. According to Lock, Protestant religious sentiment therefore tended to find expression not in precise local recognitions but in broad appreciations of the landscape, which often invoked discourses of the sublime and a kind of optics of assimilation. Perspectival distance also became inseparable from cultivating a rhetoric of reason, since it reinforced cognitive detachment. One further corollary of this attitude was a search for vacancy and ruin, for a kind of desert purity uncluttered by ‘modern’ buildings put up by rival faiths. So (Hummel & Hummel, 1995, p. 13) the tension between the heavenly Jerusalem and its earthly counterpart, between the Jerusalem of the Romantic imagination and the reality of a small, Representing Palestine to the British in the Nineteenth Century 335 economically deprived town in the hinterland of the Turkish empire, could be eased by a certain kind of looking, which revitalised a sense of being part of the biblical narrative whilst editing out the inappropriate and the dissonant. Protestant dislike of material mediation might of course have led to a questioning of the need to visit the Holy Land at all, but this problem could be sidestepped by arguing that the search was for Christ himself – perceived less as an object of pilgrimage and more as a fellow seeker after the divine. Lock’s work resonates with a more generally made argument about landscape. Thomas (1993, pp. 21–22) summarises the point by claiming that perspective art locates the viewer outside of the picture, outside of the relationships being depicted. As with Pratt’s (1992, p. 205) discussion of the so-called ‘monarch-of-all-I-survey’ scene common within imperial visual discourse, the viewer is rendered transcendental, and because landscape art presents the world from the point of view of the outsider, that which is inside the frame takes on the passive role of object, denied any agency of its own. To paraphrase Macintyre & MacKenzie (1992), focal or perspectival distance becomes an analogue of cultural distance. Of course it might be argued that Lock’s and similar arguments ignore a rather different mode of representing the Orient that was common in the Victorian period: that of drowning it in detail.9 Writers such as Edward William Lane, author of the hugely influential Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), and Sir Richard Burton provided comprehensive accounts of other ways of life, and yet even such work created its own distancing effect to the extent that it simultaneously objectified and particularised – and judged – other ways of life. But my main point is that a focus on distanced optics of assimilation cannot quite tell the whole story of Protestant encounters with and representations of the Holy Land. Examples of more proximate, ambivalent, practices of engagement can also be found, as the proprietorial mode is juxtaposed with the cultivation of a much more participative connection with concrete, foreground actuality (Hirsch, 1995; Coleman, 2002). Such a connection objectifies cultural and physical landscape to be sure, but it also collapses the distance between viewer and viewed – and between biblical and ‘cultural’ centres (as perceived by the Victorians) – in significant ways. It also depends, of course, on the physical travel of writers and artists of the period, alongside the imaginative travel of readers and viewers who gained ‘access’ to powerful landscapes through texts and pictures. From Text to Experience In considering the hundreds of travel books written about the Orient after the midnineteenth century, Said (1978, p. 192) argues that a distinction can be drawn between those detailing the delights, exploits and ‘testimonial portentiousness’ of individual pilgrims in the East, and the authoritative reports of scholarly travellers, missionaries and other expert travellers. Such a distinction is not particularly helpful in considering the sample of British accounts I discuss here, since I focus on generally serious but often anecdotal, individual accounts written by authors with some claims to expertise in relation to the Near East or at least theology. A uniting feature of the texts I examine is their considerable success in attracting numerous readers to their representations of the Holy Land. 336 S. Coleman One possible reading of these accounts is to consider the extent to which they play on the dialectics between distance and proximity in developing representations not only of landscape, but also of the act of looking itself. A common trope in the Victorian and Edwardian travel literature (hardly confined to it, of course) refers to the ways in which physical presence in the Holy Land might actually enhance the experience of reading sacred text. For instance, Arthur Stanley, future Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford and Dean of Westminster, notes in the introduction to his Sinai and Palestine in Connection with their History (1864, p. ix) that his aim is ‘to point out how much or how little the Bible gains by being seen, so to speak, through the eyes of the country, or the country by being seen through the eyes of the Bible’.10 Stanley deploys a visual metaphor that textualizes the process of seeing, just as it introduces the idea of (potentially) enhancing reading through experience. The missionary W.M. Thomson’s hugely popular The Land and the Book, published in 1884, went so far as to claim (p. 1) that: ‘The Land and the Book – with reverence be it said – constitute the ENTIRE and ALL-PERFECT TEXT, and should be studied together’. Some 30 years later, another Christian writer, John Kelman, again makes the connections between travel, faith and reading, this time expressing it through invoking the language of the Bible itself in order to see travel as a means of attaining a kind of grace (1912, p. 3): A journey through the Holy Land may reasonably be expected to be…a sacramental event in a man’s life…Such sacramental help must surely be given by anything that brings vividly to our realisation those scenes and that life in the midst of which the Word was made flesh. The more clearly we can gain the impression of places and events in Syria, the more reasonable and convincing will Christian faith become. Kelman links the scenes of the Bible with those of the journey, and in the process argues for a connection between seeing and faith, both in terms of the vivid impression made on the Christian and in the sense that such observation promotes ‘reason’ in one’s religious conviction. But of course most of his readers could not make the journey themselves. In his book, Kelman attempted to resolve this problem by juxtaposing his text with images of the Holy Land painted by an artist (John Fulleylove). A further aid to religious engagement was the occasional presentation of the Holy Land as empty stage – or perhaps I should use instead the metaphor of an empty page, ready to receive the inscriptive practices of the traveller/writer/artist, and ultimately reader/viewer. In this sense, the archaeology of the Holy Land was significant not merely as a potential source of knowledge about the past, but also because it was not sufficiently intact to intrude on the Protestant imagination. Stanley writes, for instance (1864, p. B117) of what he sees as a ‘peculiarity of the present aspect of Palestine’: Above all other countries in the world, it is a Land of Ruins…In Judaea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that whilst for miles and miles there is no Representing Palestine to the British in the Nineteenth Century 337 appearance of present life or habitation, except the occasional goat-herd on the hillside, or gathering of women at the wells. The region is made unique precisely because of a kind of absence, a sense of having fallen from a state of relative architectural and social integrity, and thus being in need of regeneration and reconstitution. There is much to suggest here that optical propriety mediated by distance is indeed important in narratives describing how the land is being observed: it is not just that the Bible is gaining by being seen, but it is being seen, and thus reconstituted11 – in a particular kind of way. Stanley’s book is characterised by a fairly consistent concern with elevation – a feature that is said to be notable in the Holy Land, so that (p. B131) ‘every high point in it commands a prospect of greater extent than is common in ordinary mountain districts’. The Bible becomes a book of views – of Abraham on the mountain east of Bethel, Lot lifting up his eyes and beholding the plain of Jordan, and so on. And a point of high drama in many accounts is the first sight of Jerusalem, seen from afar. A little before Stanley was writing, the Protestant artist Thomas Seddon, who accompanied Hunt for part of his first journey to the Holy Land, expresses the common sense of surprise as the traveller looks up from the proximate, the ground, into the distance:12 We climbed up with sight alone bent on the horses’ path. Suddenly and unbidden our beasts stopped, we raised our eyes and there all the scene had opened, a great landscape was spread before us, and in the centre stood our city. Foursquare it was and compact in itself…[and] where the line of the northern mass sloped down and left a gap between itself and a southern continuation…appeared a far distant horizontal range of mountains of amethyst and azure blue, the Mountains of Moab. This provides a fine example of what Pratt (1992, p. 204) sees as ‘Victorian discovery rhetoric’, often associated (ibid., p. 202) with ‘promontary descriptions’, with the masterful narrative converting local landscape into European knowledge and experience. Here, the city is at the centre of the gaze but it also prompts the viewer to look beyond, towards further mountains, as if its frame cannot be contained by its walls. Kelman (1912, p. 6) also finds himself looking up at the hills as well as at the city, not least because they take him back to the past since ‘their great sky-lines are unchanged’. In the writings of Sir Frederick Treves,13 meanwhile, we see how the contrast between the distant and the proximate takes on a further ideological implication. The pleasant reverie he has of the Ark while he stares out of the window of the train taking him from Jaffa to Jerusalem contrasts markedly with his dyspeptic description of actually entering the Holy City, and discovering for instance that (Treves, 1912, p. 54): ‘The Via Dolorosa is a mere fiction of the Christian Church, a lane of lies, a path of fraud’. He concludes (p. 84) that: ‘Those who find comfort in the belief that ‘‘There is a green hill far away, Without a city wall’’ and who would keep that vision clear and unspoiled, should never come nigh to Jerusalem’. Yet, contained in these same accounts are the stirrings of a more complex way of mediating between, rather than opposing, distance and proximity, detail and 338 S. Coleman blankness, representation and experience – and indeed of bringing the reader into the experience being described in the text as a Protestant structure of feeling is also linked to a particular way of accessing landscape. Even the occasionally cynical Treves presents a vision of plainness rendered sacred by one key figure (1912, p. 86): The Mount of Olives is a brown ridge, very common-place…It is, I think, the least beautiful hill I can call to mind…This Olivet, this path to the village of Bethany, this way leading to the Jordan, are all sacred sites; this is of unquestionable genuineness. This is the country that was traversed by the feet of Christ; this is the very view that, in every dip and knoll, was familiar to His eyes. This is a veritable part of the Holy Land…It is one of the few true things in Palestine, and one very wholesome to look upon after that surfeit of glamour and imposture which the church beneath one’s feet provides. Treves is encouraging proximity to a landscape that is rendered spiritually authentic through being seen through Christ’s eyes, a place in effect perceived and reconstituted through sacred personhood. Similarly, when Kelman looks up at the unchanged hills, he reflects on the parallels between his vision and that of others who have come before him (Kelman, 1912, p. 6): ‘The long vistas and clear-cut edges…are the same which filled the eyes of prophets and apostles, and of Jesus Christ himself’. So place and its representation become reframed within the person of a Christ who is not only an observer, but a fellow-traveller through the landscape. Vision can turn easily to another powerful form of embodiment involving the possibility of selfidentification with, even mimesis of, the ultimate holy figure. Thus Kelman (1912, p. 7): ‘These pathways were, indeed, once trodden by His feet…The divine mystery of Christ is all the more commanding when the human fact of Jesus has become almost a memory rather than a belief’. Or again, the Methodist Cuthbertson writes of his experience of standing on a high vantage-point on the outskirts of Nazareth that gives a prospect of the whole of the Galilee: ‘I could not help thinking of more sacred eyes which had looked upon these sights and ranged these landscapes; such memories had a subduing effect on me’. Of course these extracts often also describe distant views, but they are views that afford closeness to Christ through occupying his perspective. In doing so, they embody a significant challenge to what Pratt (1992, p. 219) sees as the ‘dehumanizing western habit of representing other parts of the world as having no history’ (see also Fabian, 1983). The Holy Land is not only a land whose history is deeply implicated with that of the West; it also provides a landscape wherein the gaze of the believer is subordinated to that of the ‘sacred eyes’ of Christ. The confidence of imperialist gaze – and one in which many of the local inhabitants are ignored or seen as debased in relation to biblical times – is disturbed, distorted, at least on one level, by the imagined agency of a figure who inhabits the twin landscapes of both memory and belief. Such an appropriation of landscape provides a Protestant means of making narrative come alive, but it is also a strategy that is aimed at translating the vision and the experience to others. As Hummel & Hummel (1995, p. 29) put it: ‘These testimonies allowed others to come to know the Jesus whom the Holy Land proclaims but whose true domain is in the hearts of believers’. Thompson’s The Land and the Book actually coordinated scenes from the Holy Land and biblical text so Representing Palestine to the British in the Nineteenth Century 339 that the person could recreate effects of a pilgrimage in his or her own living room, and such a process was enhanced more generally as stereoscopic prints were widely developed, with appropriate biblical references printed on the card (Hummel & Hummel, 1995, p. 29). These prints as well as other media, such as panoramas (which provided the viewer a sense of being surrounded by a realistic environment), helped to promote experiences of vicarious travel in new viewing audiences, who flocked to museums, galleries and ‘world exhibitions’ and thus illustrated the connection between visual media and new forms of mobility that was evident in the nineteenth century.14 The Pre-Raphaelite Gaze The Near East was of course an object of fascination for artists as well as writers, and discourses of Realism encouraged attempts to gain ‘truthful’ representations of the external world (Stevens, 1984, p. 20). Both art and archaeology shared in the prevalent feeling that it was important to find the roots of the Christian truth in a concrete, observable reality (Warner, 1984, p. 32ff). In 1867, Edward Poynter’s work Israel in Egypt was the sensation of the 1867 season at the Royal Academy, praised for its drawing on recent Egyptological research and described in the Illustrated London News of 11 May (1867, p. 478) as ‘a typical example of the successful application of the modern principle of wedding archaeology to art’. Travel books of the time very commonly included illustrations as well as photographs, and this was a time when art exhibitions – or even the circulation of a single painting around the country – could attract a high profile in Victorian urban centres. Thus, in this newly mobile society, paintings and other images gained their own identities as travelling objects, just as they were the products of artists who had themselves travelled far and wide. Supposedly accurate artistic depiction could also have its iconoclastic dimension. David Wilkie, who went to the Holy Land in 1841 and was the first artist seriously to consider painting a Near Eastern Christ in an archaeologically accurate setting, is said (quoted in Warner, 1984, p. 33) to have noted that ‘‘‘a Martin Luther, in painting, is as much called for as in theology, to sweep away the abuses by which our divine pursuit is encumbered’’’. Wilkie was concerned to locate genuine settings for New Testament landscapes. In common with at least some other artists and writers, he appears to have regarded local inhabitants as reflections of the biblical past. He was also determined to provide a Protestant aesthetic in depicting the Holy Land through combining religious conviction with reliable observation (cf. Warner, 1984) to produce a form of artistic witness. Thus, after reaching Jerusalem in February 1841, Wilkie wrote to his nephew that his ‘object was to see what has formed the scenes of so many pictures – the scenes of so many subject painted from Scripture, but which had never been seen by the painters who have delineated them’ (Herrmann, 2000, pp. 202–204). Unfortunately, Wilkie perished at sea near Gibraltar in June 1841. However, he was to have a worthy successor in his art and his faith. Warner says of Hunt that he ‘shared Wilkie’s feeling that the painting of historically accurate biblical pictures was a distinctly Protestant endeavour. Here was an alternative to the decadent Italian tradition of Catholic devotional art, an advertisement to the 340 S. Coleman world that Protestantism could accept scientific enquiry as a means of approaching God’ (Warner, 1984, p. 33). The logic of this position was to turn art into a form of research, basing representation on the gathering of reliable information. Depicting the landscape of the Holy Land was not only a matter of providing information: it was also something of a claim, an argument about the relevance of that landscape to the viewer. Hunt, something of a natural polemicist, was also embodying a PreRaphaelite vision that was deeply controversial because it focused on some of the contradictions of Victorian life, combining as it did a form of antiquarianism with iconoclasm, a search for past subjects with an awareness of the importance of visual technologies in the present. The Brotherhood specialised in a crossing of Romantic historicism with a self-conscious realism, with a focus on detail contributing to what Sambrook calls (1974, p. 3) ‘a spiritualized naturalism’. The new movement’s pledge to accuracy and clarity was partially realised through portraying natural subjects in daylight and in full colour, and partly by an emphasis on apparent historical and archeological accuracy when depicting the past. The act of production was therefore often located out-of-doors, with the artist contending with the elements even as he or very occasionally she was painting them. For Smith (2004, p. 11) the roots of the Pre-Raphaelite view on landscape could be traced to the Romantic emphasis on the visual complexity of humble objects, and the importance attached to intimate experiences of nature and place. Thus propinquity itself became a principle of production. Being in nature, while painting it, aimed to transfer a visceral quality of experience in relation to the present and the history of an environment. The focus on verification was also influenced by photography, with the new medium articulating novel conditions of realism (Smith, 1995, p. 96). If painting necessitated a process of referential verification, real models were required, while the discourse of photography also made the condition of ‘having been there’ an aesthetic necessity (ibid, p. 110). However, while other PRB members such as Rossetti and Millais painted scenes from the lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ in London, Hunt took the Brotherhood’s principles to their logical extreme and incorporated painting into his personal pilgrimage to the Holy Land (Warner, 1984, p. 33), while sometimes being accompanied on his travels by James Graham, a photographer who worked during the 1850s for the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews. Besides his desire to see and paint biblical scenes on the spot, Hunt was convinced that religious truth need not be confined to the pages of the Gospels themselves. In 1855 he famously wrote to William Michael Rossetti:15 I am not satisfied with the thousand books of travel that come out every year…I have a notion that painters should go out two by two, like merchants of nature, and bring home precious merchandise in faithful pictures of scenes interesting from historical considerations or from the strangeness of the subject itself. As a ‘merchant of nature’, Hunt saw himself in explicitly mobile terms, reaching out into the world and competing with other modes of representation as he did so, and of course offering his ‘merchandise’ for others to consume. Representing Palestine to the British in the Nineteenth Century 341 Here, I focus on Hunt’s creation of scenes that took even further than texts what I have described as the Protestant notion of a mobile landscape, both depicting sacred place and exhibiting anxieties about it, and in doing so creating a natural, archaeological and ethnological frame that is meant at times actually to encompass the viewer. I start with Hunt’s The Sphinx, Giza, Looking Towards the Pyramids of Saqqara, painted in 1854 at the beginning of his two-year trip. Of course Hunt is taking a classic subject here, but what is fascinating is that Hunt does not show us the face of the monument: we gaze instead at its back, at his geological focus on the natural bedrock and his painterly focus on the desert. In a sense then this becomes a picture about not looking, or at least not looking conventionally, and a means almost of bypassing an Egyptian monument on a journey that is aiming for a Christian sacred landscape.16 Such an approach contrasts with Hunt’s work on The Scapegoat, painted in 1854– 55 and the first major example of his Protestant vision, located in the Holy Land. There is again the interest in topography but we are confronted, in a deliberately stark manner, by a biblical figure – the scapegoat located in an otherwise barren and empty landscape, not only recalling an Old Testament sacrifice (see Leviticus 16, 21– 2) but also prefiguring Christ, and perhaps even the misunderstood artist. Although the picture was finished in Jerusalem, Hunt began it in Sodom, spending 17 days on the shores of the Dead Sea working on the picture. As John Davis remarks (1996, p. 132), in describing a similar feat carried out by the American artist Edward Troye a couple of years later, at the time it was unusual for Westerners to spend more than a few hours in the valley. Hunt’s extreme realism in his painting of the goat is one of the things, according to Smith (1995) that damned it for the critics who viewed it at the Royal Academy in 1856. The biblical reference might have been familiar, but not the photographic literalness of the connection between the figure and its referent. Ironically, such detail, while in one sense bringing the landscape as near as possible to the viewer, also seemed to exclude such viewers through a plethora of selfconfirming information. Yet Hunt was attempting – however unsuccessfully – to plunge the viewer as well as the artist into the landscape, with the central figure deliberately foregrounded in a way that is unsettling, in keeping with the subject matter. Indeed, Hunt even hoped that the picture might convert the Jews to a belief that Christ was the true Messiah (Bowness, 1984). In a minor way, Hunt’s strategy was echoed by his sometime fellow-traveller Thomas Seddon’s, whose most famous work, Valley of Jehoshaphat: Painted on the Spot (1854–55) self-consciously introduced the viewer to a detailed landscape, largely without figures, as if available to be trodden upon by either Christ or the viewer.17 While The Scapegoat provides one striking example of a Protestant aesthetic that is about propinquity rather than a distanced optics of propriety, about translating a distant biblical space to the space of the viewer, the sense of being ‘on the spot’ is also in evidence in a more popular painting by Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, prepared at about the same time and again referring to biblical text (Luke ll: 45–9). To create the work, Hunt consulted Talmudic texts and attended a Passover service in Jerusalem in 1855, and more generally he was in the habit of visiting the synagogue in Jerusalem on Saturdays. This was the picture that established Hunt’s reputation as a painter who could render biblical scenes with archaeological accuracy, but we should also note the figure of Christ in the picture. 342 S. Coleman Like the Scapegoat, Christ gazes at the viewer, mediating between the picture and the audience, while also invoking a Victorian audience’s knowledge of what will happen in the future: the supercession of the Old Covenant with the New. The sense we gain of Hunt attempting to give the viewer direct access to the divine in a landscape that reproduces, as accurately as possible, that of the original, is also gained by work of his that attempts to do the exact opposite (Coleman, 2002). We have already seen his anxieties about viewing in his depiction of the Sphinx. Meanwhile a much later picture, The Miracle of the Holy Fire (1896–99), illustrates not a Protestant scene but a ritual that Hunt witnessed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that he regarded as superstitious nonsense. In this picture, full of ethnographic detail, not only is there no fixed point of engagement with the viewer, but a European woman in the lower right-hand corner actually shields her children from the excesses of the scene. This is a picture precisely about not viewing, not translating from one centre to another – and indeed about gaining a distance from a biblical landscape that is seen as threatening. In a sense, this becomes a picture illustrating the dangers of travel, of experiencing through mobility that which should be forbidden, and so the viewer is encouraged not to enter the scene, not to invoke the pious and committed gaze. The experiential and ideological link between sacred centre (the Holy Land) and political centre (Britain/Europe) is hinted at, only to be broken in a way that is itself an act of Protestant piety. Concluding Remarks This paper has not only been a (brief) tale of two centres, biblical and contemporary, and the relations of translation between the two; it has also been about the tensions between distance and propinquity in the experience and representation of the Holy Land for Victorians in Britain. To be sure, such tensions had complex roots in the nineteenth century. The Romantic poets had, as Smith (2004, p. 16) puts it, been enchanted with ‘hereness and nowness’ even as they attempted to convey such experiences to distant others. Later, in the early decades of the twentieth century, ethnography itself would attempt to create an ambivalent experience of the exotic other for the reader – most famously in Malinowski’s ‘Imagine yourself suddenly set down…’ (1922; see Hirsch, 1995, p. 1). However, one of the things that makes textual and pictorial representations of the Holy Land so fascinating for this period was their already established salience as a centre – one that was already in some textual sense ‘known’ for many in the West. Spyer (1998) has described the phenomenon of ‘border fetishisms’, material objects inhabiting the unstable, performative spaces between novel, cross-cultural landscapes, and often linked to European expansion. Here, I have described just a few of the spaces created and mediated by textual and visual representation, but in the case I am describing the European expansion itself had a long history, and was to a land that was not merely Other in relation to European understandings of the (religious) self. The landscape thus created – located between sacred and secular centres of Victorian life – was far from novel, and yet needed to be reconstituted in ways acceptable to Protestants of the period.18 Featherstone (1997, p. 241) has noted that the linkage between mobility and the regenerative powers of travel is a powerful theme in Western culture, with travel often being regarded as aiding the decentring of habitual categories. Again here, the Representing Palestine to the British in the Nineteenth Century 343 ambiguous space created by representations of the Holy Land often used travel to reinforce assumptions about that land’s significance, but did so in ways that were adapted to the ways of seeing and knowing of the period. We have therefore seen how Protestant attempts to recapture the experience of having actually been in the Holy Land helped both to reinforce and diffuse the sense of Palestine as a centre of attention. Travel to the holy sites had the potential to secularise their significance, turning them into ‘mere’ tourist attractions. But, in the hands of more devout writers and painters, works might be produced whose consumption could make of the reader/viewer a new centre of experience, a site of ‘knowing’ the Holy Land in a way that complemented what could be gained from reading the Bible. Paintings in particular – and panoramas – could provide vicarious trips through the Holy Land. Images and words might be used to create interactions between believer and representations that had their own spiritual validity. Of course I have examined merely a tiny sample of Victorian and Edwardian representations of the Holy Land. But I have tried to show some of the complexities of Protestant representations that were ‘Orientalist’ to be sure, but also contending with unresolvable tensions between science and scripture, distance and engagement, and sometimes intended – as in Hunt’s work – precisely to challenge the Victorian audience. Protestant concerns over distance and proximity expressed specific religious worries, and yet in their own way they prefigured the secular worries of other travellers that would follow: both the anthropologists and in some cases the archaeologists who wished themselves to bring back ‘truthful’ representations of the Other to audiences at home.19 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. For further elaboration of this point, and a paper discussing some of the issues covered here, see Coleman (2002). In a letter written to Thomas Combe from Cairo in 1853 (Holman-Hunt, 1969, p. 97). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for an elaboration for this point about the technologies of travel. Hunt travelled four times to the Holy Land during his lifetime. From Sir Frederick Treves’s book (published in 1912): The Land that is Desolate: An Account of a Tour in Palestine. David Morgan, 9 November 2004, ‘The Popular reception of visual media in the late nineteenth century US’, paper given to the Department of Anthropology, Sussex University. Compare this point with Mitchell’s (1994, p. 2) discussion of how landscape can circulate as a medium of exchange. This is not to deny that issues of realism were also relevant to non-Protestant artists and writers, but it is to argue that they raised particular questions for those with a Protestant sensibility. Compare with Mukerji’s (1997, p. 3) discussion of how the imposition of state control over land in eighteenth-century France was associated with increased detail in cartographic depictions of land. Stanley was a liberal Protestant who made his first journey in 1852. He was a prime mover in the development of the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1865. Compare this point with Pratt’s (1992, p. 204) argument that the discoverer brings the discovery into being through texts. Quoted in Marsh (1996, p. 92). Surgeon, soldier and travel-writer. A point emphasised by an anonymous reviewer of this paper. Quoted in Staley (2004, p. 99). 344 S. Coleman 16. Marsh (1996, p. 88) notes Hunt’s description: ‘The Pyramids themselves are extremely ugly blocks…Their only association that I value is that Joseph, Moses and Jesus [sic] must have looked upon them.’ The Valley also had a current significance for those who knew their Bible, since according to Joel 3: 2 it was the place where the God of Israel would gather all nations for judgment. Cf. Featherstone’s (1997, p. 240) discussion of wandering aesthetics, drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and their discussions of ‘nomadic thought’ and art. On this point, compare also with Bajc’s paper in this volume, which is concerned with the movement from ‘mundane walking’ into ‘biblical reality’ experienced by contemporary pilgrims to the Holy Land. 17. 18. 19. References Bowness, A. (1984) Introduction, The Pre-Raphaelites [Catalogue] (London: Tate Gallery), pp. 11–26. Casson, H. (1984) Foreword, in: M. A. Stevens (Ed.), The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse. European Painters in North Africa and the Near East (London: Royal Academy of Arts), pp. 13. Coleman, S. (2002) From the sublime to the meticulous: art, anthropology and Victorian pilgrimage to Palestine, History and Anthropology, 13(4), pp. 275–290. Coleman, S. & Crang, M. (2002) Introduction, in: S. & M. (Eds), Tourism: Between Place and Performance (Oxford: Berghahn), pp. 1–17. Davis, J. (1996) The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press). Featherstone, M. (1997) Travel, migration, and images of social life, in: G. Wang (Ed.), Global History and Migrations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), pp. 1–17. Herrmann, L. (2000) Nineteenth Century British Painting (London: Giles de la Mare Publishers). Hirsch, E. (1995) Introduction: landscape: between place and space, in: E. Hirsch & M. O’Hanlon (Eds), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space (Clarendon: Oxford), pp. 1–30. Holman-Hunt, D. (1969) My Grandfather: His Wives and Loves [London: Hamish Hamilton). Howe, K. (1997) Revealing the Holy Land: nineteenth-century photographs of Palestine, in: K. Howe (Ed.), Revealing the Holy Land: The Photographic Exploration of Palestine (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art), pp. 16–46. Hummel, R. & Hummel, T. (1995) Patterns of the Sacred: English Protestant and Russian Orthodox Pilgrims of the Nineteenth Century (London: Scorpion Cavendish). Hunt, H. (1905) Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (London: Macmillan). Kelman, J. (1912) The Holy Land Painted by John Fulleylove, R.I., Described by John Kelman, M.A (London: Adam & Charles Black). Lock, C. (2002) Bowing down to wood and stone: one way to be a pilgrim, in: S. Coleman & J. Elsner (Eds), Pilgrim Voices: Narrative and Authorship in Christian Pilgrimage (Oxford: Berghahn), pp. 110–132. Lury, C. (1997) The objects of tourism, in: C. Rojek & J. Urry (Eds), Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory (London: Routledge), pp. 75–95. Macintyre, M. & MacKenzie, M. (1992) Focal length as an analogue of cultural distance, in: E. (Ed.), Anthropology and Photography 1860-1920 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press), pp. 158–163. Marsh, J. (1996) The Pre-Raphaelites: Their Lives in Letters and Diaries (London: Collins & Brown). Mitchell, W. T. (1994) Imperial landscape, in: W. T. Mitchell (Ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), pp. 5–34. Mukerji, C. (1997) Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pratt, M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge). Said, E. W. (1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Sambrook, J. (Ed.) (1974) Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press). Representing Palestine to the British in the Nineteenth Century 345 Smith, A. (2004) The enfranchised eye, in: A. Staley & C. Newall (Eds), Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature (London: Tate), pp. 11–21. Smith, L. (1995) Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Spyer, P. (1998) Introduction, in: P. Spyer (Ed.), Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (London: Routledge), pp. 1–11. Staley, A. (2004) Rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, in: A. Staley & C. Newall (Eds), Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth to Nature (London: Tate), pp. 25–31. Stanley, A. P. (1864) Sinai and Palestine in Connection with their History (London: John Murray). Stevens, M. (1984) Western art and its encounter with the Islamic world 1798–1914, in: M. Stevens (Ed.), The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse: The Allure of North Africa and the Near East (London: Royal Academy of Arts), pp. 15–23. Thomas, J. (1993) The politics of vision and the archaeologies of landscape, in: B. Bender (Ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Oxford: Berg), pp. 19–48. Thomson, W. M. (1884) The Land and the Book; Or, Biblical Illustrations Drawn from the Manners and Customs, the Scenes and Scenery of The Holy Land (London: T. Nelson and Sons). Treves, Sir F. (1912) The Land that is Desolate: An Account of a Tour in Palestine (London: Smith, Elder & Co.). Urry, J. (2000) Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge). Warner, M. (1984) The question of faith: Orientalism, Christianity and Islam, in: M. Stevens (Ed.), The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse: The Allure of North Africa and the Near East (London: Royal Academy of Arts), pp. 32–39.