by Tom Gurney
Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on October 19, 2026
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
The Scapegoat
A pale goat stands alone on a crusted shore, between shallow water and distant mountains. Its head lowers towards the viewer, a red band is tied around its horns, and the desolate ground is strewn with remains of other animals. In William Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat, one creature bears almost the entire burden of a wide landscape. The scene looks minutely observed, but the subject is drawn from the Day of Atonement rite in Leviticus 16 and was presented by Hunt as a Christian religious image. The large painting, made between 1854 and 1856, is in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, where it is catalogued as LL 3623. [1] [2]
There are two important painted versions. Hunt made a smaller, more brightly coloured picture, now in Manchester Art Gallery, in 1854–55. Its goat is darker and a rainbow appears in its sky. The larger Lady Lever canvas, with a light-coated goat and a more sombre effect, was the one shown at the Royal Academy in 1856. These differences are central to reading the works, not incidental variations in digital reproduction. A photograph of one version should never be captioned with the other version's collection, measurements or exhibition history. [3] [4] [5]
At a Glance
- ArtistWilliam Holman Hunt (1827–1910)
- TraditionBritish Pre-Raphaelite art
- Work or subjectThe Scapegoat
- ContextIllustrated paintings guide
- Further readingArtist biography
What is a scapegoat in Leviticus?
The biblical source is Leviticus 16, which describes rites for the Day of Atonement. Two goats are presented. One is offered as a sacrifice; over the other, the priest confesses the community's wrongdoing and sends it away into the wilderness. The departing animal symbolically carries those wrongs to a remote place. Hunt paints this goat sent away, not the goat sacrificed at the sanctuary. The scene's isolation, exhausted animal and harsh ground turn the act of removal into a visible predicament. [6] [1]
The image does not depict an episode from the life of Jesus. Hunt nevertheless understood the Old Testament rite through a Christian lens: the goat carrying others' sins prefigured, for him, Christ bearing human suffering. This is a typological interpretation, a way of reading an earlier biblical event as foreshadowing a later one. The painting's religious force for its maker came from that connection, which was made explicit on the frame. It is useful to distinguish Hunt's interpretation from the Jewish rite itself. The Day of Atonement has its own history and significance; the picture's Christian claim is what Hunt added to it. [1]
The red band helps make the animal's assigned role visible without adding a human participant to the scene. An account in Smarthistory relates it to later Jewish tradition about a crimson thread associated with the rite and to Isaiah's colour imagery. Hunt did not turn that idea into a crowded ritual painting. Instead, he chose the aftermath: the animal has been sent away and is pictured in a place where survival appears doubtful. The viewer cannot watch the priest's action or the assembled community. We meet the consequence through the abandoned goat. [1]
In everyday English, “scapegoat” now often means a person unfairly blamed for others' faults. The painting's title comes from the biblical ritual and its Victorian Christian interpretation, not from a modern workplace or political metaphor. Yet the modern sense can sharpen one's sympathy for the animal. Its exposed body holds a moral idea that would otherwise remain abstract. That emotional transfer is an interpretation of the picture's effect; the biblical text itself does not describe Hunt's particular goat, shore or sky.
A landscape of exposure
The large canvas is wide and low. Hunt gives a substantial portion of it to the shore, the horizontal Dead Sea and the serrated mountains beyond. The goat stands just forward of the middle, broad enough to dominate but small enough to seem vulnerable within the empty reach of land. Its shaggy coat catches attention first. Then the eye finds the salt, shallow water, broken bodies and far horizon. The picture's power depends on that movement between close animal and enormous place. [1]
The pale coat is carefully differentiated from the pale deposits on the ground. Long strands of hair mark a living body; hard patches of salt and mud press against the hooves. Hunt does not soften the foreground into a picturesque sandy beach. Uneven earth and animal remains make the scene physically resistant. The skeletons serve as warnings of what could happen next. They also keep death present without showing it happen. This is why the picture can feel tragic even though it represents no human figure, dramatic gesture or explicit act of violence.
The distant mountains and coloured sky complicate that severity. The horizon opens to a space that might seem beautiful, but it offers no obvious refuge for the goat. Hunt's high-definition rendering of the Dead Sea region encourages the viewer to register each material feature while reading the whole as a spiritual allegory. The scenery is neither a mere diagram of a Bible verse nor a landscape stripped of religious meaning. Its visible particularities supply the conditions under which his imagined animal suffers.
The painting is often praised for “truth to nature,” the Pre-Raphaelite commitment to examining the visible world closely. That description fits the surfaces of hair, salt and sky, but needs a limit. Hunt selected a site and posed an animal to enact a text from antiquity. He was not watching an ancient atonement ceremony or documenting what a single historical scapegoat looked like. The picture combines field observation with a constructed religious narrative. The combination is a key part of its originality.
The Dead Sea journey
Hunt travelled to Jerusalem and the Dead Sea region in 1854. Rebecca Jeffrey Easby describes an October visit to the area and a return in November, when Hunt camped near a place he called Oosdomm. He spent about seventeen days carrying his canvas between the camp and a painting site. The location was identified in his 1856 exhibition catalogue as the margin of the salt-encrusted shallows of the Dead Sea, with the mountains of Edom beyond. This is Hunt's own site claim, recorded in material quoted by National Museums Liverpool; it should be presented as such rather than used as a modern geolocation. [1] [7]
The journey was arduous. Smarthistory draws on Hunt's 1887 recollection and letters or journal material for threats, language barriers, difficult travel and work on a day he would ordinarily have observed as a Sabbath. The late retrospective account is important evidence for how Hunt presented his artistic purpose, though not every incident can be independently verified from it. His insistence on working at the shoreline helps explain the unusual visual specificity of the ground and distant ridge. It also reveals the labour that Victorian viewers were encouraged to see behind the picture. [1]
The story also belongs to a wider nineteenth-century pattern of European travel to places associated with biblical narratives. Archaeology, tourism and imperial relationships shaped what British artists and their audiences imagined as access to the “Holy Land.” Hunt's direct observation was real, but it was mediated by guides, companions, local people and his prior reading. The painting's authority as an image of an ancient story relied partly on the prestige of travel. Stating that context does not diminish the effort of painting outdoors; it tells us why those efforts mattered to his original audience. [1]
The goat as a model
Hunt's animal models made the picture difficult to complete. He acquired a rare white goat for the work. Drawings of it survive, but the contemporary journal evidence cited by Easby does not clearly establish that the animal travelled on every daily trek to the exact painting site. It became ill after the return to Jerusalem and died. A replacement goat was then posed in Hunt's studio with rocks, mud and salt brought from the region. The completed image therefore mixes observed landscape with later indoor work. [1]
Watch: William Holman Hunt
Begin with Hunt’s paintings, then place his work alongside two fellow Pre-Raphaelite founders.
William Holman Hunt Paintings
An overview of Hunt’s paintings from TheHistoryOfArt video archive.
Watch on YouTubeThis matters for how the painting's realism is described. The goat looks convincingly present on the shore; that does not mean that the canvas was finished there or that one animal served every stage. Hunt adjusted conditions in order to produce a credible result. The replacement model, like the transported ground materials, became part of the translation from travel observation to a studio picture. The exact sequence of adjustments matters less to the viewer than the tension between an observed place and the imagined ancient event staged within it.
The animal's expression is readily read as suffering, yet that response comes through choices in pose, light, surface and surroundings. Eyes lifted, head down, coarse hair and unstable footing concentrate pathos. The picture invites human sympathy without making the goat human. It also withholds the comfort of a rescue or a visible community. Hunt's religious meaning and the viewer's immediate pity work through the same painted body. That is one reason the work can communicate before its biblical source is identified.
Manchester study and Lady Lever canvas
The small Manchester picture is an oil on canvas, 33.7 × 45.9 cm, dated 1854–55 in the owning gallery's direct record. It contains a dark-coated goat and a rainbow and uses stronger, brighter colour. The larger Lady Lever work is recorded at about 86 × 140 cm in Smarthistory; Art UK lists 87 × 139.8 cm. Museums sometimes report dimensions differently through measurement or rounding, so the small discrepancy is best left visible rather than “corrected” without a collection file. Both records firmly identify the Lady Lever work as the broad canvas and the Manchester one as much smaller. [3] [5] [1]
The two paintings were made close together, and Art UK describes them as created at the same time. The Manchester work is sometimes called a sketch or early version, but those labels should not make it disappear as an object in its own right. Its colour and weather alter the emotional conditions of the subject. A rainbow can suggest possible resolution beyond the barren shore. The large picture's paler animal and subdued setting direct more pressure towards isolation and endurance. These are interpretive comparisons based on the two reproduced compositions, not a claim that Hunt left a written explanation of every change. [4] [9]
The 1856 Royal Academy exhibition belongs to the larger canvas. An Art UK account specifies that distinction, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies the 1856 picture as the source of a later engraving. It is easy to collapse both versions into the same exhibition record because they share a title and dates. Holding the collection and measurements alongside the title prevents that error. The inherited lead image on this page shows the pale goat and the wide scene, so the page's primary object is the Lady Lever canvas. [4] [10]
A frame that tells the viewer how to read
Hunt's designed frame was part of the large painting's message. It carried passages from Isaiah 53:4 and Leviticus 16:22, connecting the goat's burden to a Christian reading of suffering. The frame thus supplies an interpretation that the image alone might leave open. Without it, a viewer could see a highly rendered animal in a desolate landscape and miss Hunt's intended theological parallel. The framed object gives both the biblical rite and the Christian typology a place beside the paint. [1]
The frame's carved and gilded decoration deserves attention too. Specialist frame research identifies Joseph Green the younger as its maker in 1855 and describes low-relief motifs worked in gesso on its rails. Hunt's input into the design is clear in the relationship between image, verses and symbolic decoration, though “artist-designed” need not mean he personally carved the wood or applied the gilding. A web image cropped to the canvas hides much of this apparatus. A museum visitor looking at the framed painting encounters a more forceful statement of its intended meaning. [11]
The inscriptions also mark an ethical distinction in interpretation. Leviticus describes a ritual within ancient Jewish worship; Hunt's use of Isaiah to foreshadow Christ is a Christian reading of Hebrew scripture. One can explain the artist's belief without presenting it as the only legitimate meaning of those texts. That difference is especially important when the work is read beside The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, where current scholarship examines Hunt's anti-Jewish visual stereotyping in detail.
Exhibition, criticism and reproduction
The Scapegoat was shown at the Royal Academy in 1856. Its bleakness and mixture of literal landscape and symbolic subject challenged expectations of a familiar Bible painting. Contemporary viewers disagreed over whether the work was a convincing sacred image or an eccentric animal study. Ruskin’s 1856 Academy review found the picture flawed in places but also the most thought-provoking work in the gallery; he dwelt on Hunt’s Dead Sea study and on the effort required to understand the goat’s biblical role. Smarthistory describes the initial uncertainty, and the Met calls the exhibition a sensation. These responses are not mutually exclusive: attention can be intense while opinion is divided. The work's radical feature was partly its refusal to present a conventional human religious drama. [12] [1] [10]
Hunt's friend Ford Madox Brown later praised its ability to turn an old goat and saline deposits into a tragic image. His admiration, recorded in his diary according to the annotated Academy Notes and quoted by the Met, is evidence of a sympathetic artistic reception, not proof that all critics responded similarly. Other viewers struggled to identify the subject without its title or frame. The gap between those responses remains useful: the painting asks an audience to connect a vividly observed animal with a narrative that is not itself pictured. [12] [10] [1]
The picture reached people beyond the Academy through a substantial 1861 reproductive engraving by Charles Henry Mottram, published by Henry Graves & Co. The Met holds an impression and records its technique and dimensions. In a print, the painting's colour could not be conveyed directly, but composition, animal and landscape could circulate widely. This is a specific way to discuss influence: the image was materially reproduced, sold and collected. It also shows that its unusual subject retained public value after the mixed reactions of 1856. [10]
The owning museum records that Lever bought the painting in 1923 from that year’s Autumn Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery for £4,950. Its accession LL 3623 is a firmer identifier than the shared title when comparing the Lady Lever canvas with Manchester’s smaller painting. This later collection history belongs to the large pale-goat work; it does not describe the Manchester canvas. [2]
Why it remains unusual
Hunt made the natural world carry a theological claim without inserting a divine figure into the scene. The goat's helplessness, the salt shore and the unreachable horizon make sacrifice visible as abandonment. The frame identifies the biblical and Christian readings; the painting supplies texture and emotional weight. That collaboration between observed detail and supplied meaning is characteristic of Hunt, but The Scapegoat pushes it into an unusually severe landscape. It can be read as a striking animal painting while prompting questions about ritual, guilt and how a community transfers a burden onto one creature.
To explore Hunt's changing approach to religious subjects, compare the human debate in The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, the invitation at a closed door in The Light of the World and the workshop setting of The Shadow of Death. The paintings guide places them in the broader cluster, while the biography traces the journeys behind several of the images.
Discussion
Look closely at The Scapegoat, then compare your reading with the documented history.
Reader Insights
Which detail in The Scapegoat most affects your reading?
How do the date, medium and collection records shape that interpretation?
What remains uncertain about this work or its history?
Join the Conversation
Share a close observation or a source-backed question about The Scapegoat. The prompts above are starting points for discussion.
References
- Smarthistory, object and analysis. View source.
- National Museums Liverpool object record. View source.
- Manchester Art Gallery object record. View source.
- Art UK on the two versions. View source.
- Art UK object measurements. View source.
- Leviticus 16. View source.
- National Museums Liverpool, catalogue quotation. View source.
- Wikimedia Commons. View source.
- Victorian Web, Manchester version. View source.
- Metropolitan Museum of Art. View source.
- The Frame Blog, discussion of Hunt's Scapegoat frame. View source.
- Ruskin, Academy Notes , printed pp. 61–64. View source.
