The Shadow of Death

CC0 Public Domain Designation

1873-74

William Holman Hunt (English, 1827-1910)

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.

Status: On View, Gallery 223
Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist: William Holman Hunt
Title: The Shadow of Death
Place: England (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1873–1874
Medium: Oil on panel
Inscriptions: Initialed, dated and inscribed: 18Whh70.3 / JERUSALEM (lower right); copy mady by Whh 1873 (lower right, under frame)
Dimensions: 104.5 × 82 cm (41 × 32 1/4 in.); Framed: 137.2 × 115.9 × 9.6 cm (54 × 45 5/8 × 3 3/4 in.)
Credit Line: Joseph Winterbotham Collection
Reference Number: 2021.54
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/260424/manifest.json

Argus, August 9, 1888, 11.
Argus, August 15, 1888, 5.
Leader, September 1, 1888, 11.
Argus, November 19, 1888, 8.
Official Record of the Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne 1888-1889 (Melbourne: Sands and McDougall Limited, 1890), 640.
William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1905), 310, 382.
Evelyn Waugh, “The Only Pre-Raphaelite,” Spectator, Oct. 14, 1960, 567.
Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, eds., Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 1152, no. 1319.
Walker Art Gallery, William Holman Hunt: An Exhibition Arranged by the Walker Art Gallery, exh. cat., (Liverpool: Elliott Bros & Yeoman, 1969), cat. 46, 49-51.
Theodore Crombie, “Round the Galleries: All the Changing Scenes,” Apollo 98 (July 1973): 49, fig. 2.
Günter Metken, Praraffaeliten, exh. cat. (Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle, 1973), cat. 48, 96-97.
Thomas Agnew and Sons, Painting in England, 1630-1870, exh. cat. (London: Agnew and Sons Galleries, 1973), cat. 63, n.p.
M. Davie, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, (1976), 738.
James H. Coombs, Anne M. Scott, et al., eds., A Pre-Raphaelite Friendship: The Correspondence of William Holman Hunt and John Lucas Tupper (Anne Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), 182–83, 185–86, 190–91, 222, 236–37, 239, 244.
John Shaw, “£1.5m Price Expected for Hunt’s Masterpiece,” The Times, September 1, 1994, n.p.
Tom Sharratt, “Seeing Double: Shadow of Death,” Guardian, September 1, 1994, 5.
Geraldine Norman, “Hunt Replica Sells for Record £1.8m,” Independent, November 3, 1994, 6.
Royal Academy of Arts, Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters: The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection, exh. cat. (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2003), 21, 99, 101 (ill.), 302, cat. 64.
Judith Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1, Paintings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), no. 121, 232-34.
Alexandre Lafore, “Un chef-d’œuvre d’Holman Hunt pour Chicago,” La Tribune de l’Art, Mar. 14, 2022.
James Rondeau, ed., Paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago: Highlights of the collection (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2025), 66 (ill.).

Melbourne, The Centennial International Exhibition, Aug. 1, 1888-Mar. 9, 1889, cat. 51.
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, long term loan, 1905-1906.
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, long term loan, 1935-1973.
Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, William Holman Hunt, Mar.-April 1969; London, Victoria and Albert Museum, May-June 1969, cat. 46.
London, Thomas Agnew and Sons, Painting in England, 1630-1870, June 5-Jul.13, 1973, cat. 63.
Baden-Baden, Germany, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Praraffaeliten, Nov. 23, 1973-Feb. 24, 1974, cat. 48.
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters: The Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection, Sept. 20 – Dec. 12, 2003, cat. 64.

Commissioned by Thomas Agnew & Sons, London, March 1873; sold to John Heugh, London, December 8, 1873; sold, Christie’s, London, March 17, 1877, lot 56, to Thomas Agnew & Sons London [annotated sale catalogue; Agnew Stock Book, no. 295, National Gallery, London; in curatorial object file]; sold to John Throgmorton, Middlemore, Birmingham, England, December 23, 1896; bequeathed to the trustees of the Middlemore Estate, 1925; consigned to Thomas Agnew & Sons, London, June 5, 1973; sold to private collector, August 13, 1975; sold Sotheby’s, November 2, 1994, lot 172, to Lord Lloyd-Webber [sale catalogue in curatorial object file]; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, 2021.

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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