The Shadow of Death

This minutely detailed painting teems with symbolism as it imagines a scene from Jesus’s early life. It depicts the young Jesus stretching after his day’s labor in his father’s carpentry shop. His mother Mary kneels behind him, looking up at his shadow, which falls on a plank of wood hung with carpentry tools resembling a cross, prefiguring his crucifixion. An arched window creates a halo around Jesus’s head. The star-shaped aperture above the windows recalls the light that guided a group of priestly wise men, called Magi, to the newborn Jesus; Mary looks up from a trunk containing gift s the Magi gave on that occasion. A red headdress at Christ’s feet foreshadows the crown of thorns he will wear at his execution.

This canvas is the third and final version of a composition William Holman Hunt began in 1869 in Jerusalem, where he could study the setting from life. Hunt, like other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the art movement he helped found, was committed to direct observation of nature, and he sought to illustrate biblical subjects with archaeological exactitude. The muscular figures of Mary and Jesus, along with the precisely rendered carpentry tools, also reflect Victorian beliefs in the virtue of hard work.

The compisition was commissioned by the London dealers Thomas Agnew & Sons as the model for a print. The Art Institute’s collection also includes an early proof of that print.