BY George P. Landow , Professor of English and the History of Art, Brown University
http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/whh/selfport3.html
……the painter represents himself in the roles he had enacted when he traveled to the Middle East — those of adventurer, explorer, ethnographer, and pilgrim. Like so many European travelers, he had a love affair with the Middle East; and despite all the hardships and difficulties he endured while painting in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, he remained enthralled by these lands which had provided the setting for both sacred history and the Arabian Nights. As he told William Bell Scott in 1860 …his vocation as a painter would not let him stay in England for long: “I cannot believe that Art should let such beautiful things pass as are in this age passing for good in the East without exertion to chronicle them for the future, and I promise myself to return in spirit to the land of good Haroun Alraschid if I can’t get there in body before the present year is out” (…. Princeton University). The painter’s words well capture the complex attraction that this part of the world had for him. At the same time that he felt the urge to play the historian, anthropologist, and ethnographer and thus record the facts of life in these countries, he also indulged the romantic desire to enter the magic realm of the Thousand and One Nights. Syria, Egypt, and Palestine were, as he put it, his version of “the land of good Harun Alraschid.
…. The wonder and delight that Hunt experienced in the Middle East encouraged him not only to depict himself in garb of the region but also to return again and again…….., the painter attempted to make William Bell Scott understand that he found “true wonder” in traveling through Palestine. “We pass not merely from village to town, and from town to desert, or to an Arab encampment, lying down for the night’s rest under the unscreened stars; but we pass from century to century, from Abraham to Cambyses, from Herodotus to Jesus Christ, then to Mohammed and so to the Crusaders” (April 7, 1870; Jerusalem; Autobiographical Notes , ed. William Minto, 2 vols., London, 1892, II, 89).
…..The Holy Land, in other words, gave Hunt, as it gave David Roberts, J. F. Lewis, Thomas Seddon, and so many other nineteenth-century artists of all nations, the opportunity to combine the appeals of realism and imagination, physical fact and fantasy.
