In contrast to Wilhelm Hammershøi’s painting elsewhere in this exhibition, with doors suggestive but mysterious, the single door in William Holman Hunt’s painting has clear significance. Hunt inscribed the frames of many of his paintings with a scriptural verse to guide the reader towards the meaning he intended. The verse he appended to The Light of the World is from Revelation 3:20: 

Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. 

Hunt painted an illustration of the Lukan passage in The Importunate Neighbour, of 1895. It is a much more impassioned depiction of a man throwing himself against a barred and locked door—a great contrast to the Hammershøi painting with which it is nearly contemporary. But The Light of the World, first painted a half-century earlier (and eventually in three versions), became more famous, defining the entirety of Hunt’s achievement.

Hunt’s conversion to the Christian faith is ‘recorded’ in The Light of the World. His own religious conviction is reflected in this visit by Christ to the human soul, long-locked to divine illumination—and therefore redemption. In the midst of the darkness Christ bears light: it emanates from his lantern and from the halo around his head which highlights his crown of thorns. The dawn is about to break. His upraised hand is not deterred by the knotted vegetation that has grown up around the closed door and its rusted nails. But it is the directness of Christ’s gaze toward the viewer that has transfixed so many. 

Why was (and is) this painting so extraordinarily popular? Why did it elicit the response from the public that it did? The last version of the painting, to which assistants contributed (Hunt’s sight was failing by 1904), was sent on a world tour from 1905–07. The majority of the population of Australia viewed it in reverence and silence.

Perhaps those who saw it hoped that if they found it within themselves to open the door, they would also find Christ waiting.

References

Landow, George P. 1979. William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism (New Haven: Yale University Press)

______. 1982. ‘Shadows Cast by The Light of the World: William Holman Hunt's Religious Paintings, 1893–1905’, The Art Bulletin, 64: 646–55

Maas, Jeremy. 1984. Holman Hunt's ‘The Light of the World’ (New Haven: Scholar Press)