The Scapegoat
The Work
William Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat exists in two versions: a smaller version (1854-1856) in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, and a larger version (1854-1856) at the Manchester Art Gallery. Both were painted largely on location at Oosdoom on the shores of the Dead Sea during Hunt's expedition to Palestine in 1854-1856, a journey he undertook specifically to paint biblical subjects in their authentic geographical settings. The Dead Sea shore at Oosdoom - the site of the ancient cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by traditional identification - provided a world of surreal desolation: bleached salt flats, crystallized shore, reddish mountains on the horizon, and an atmosphere of hallucinatory clarity. Hunt nearly died from fever and exhaustion while working in this hostile environment.
Biblical Source
Leviticus 16 describes the Day of Atonement ritual in which the High Priest laid his hands on a live goat, confessing over it all the sins of Israel, and then sent it into the wilderness 'for Azazel' - to carry those sins away from the community. Hunt depicts the white goat standing alone in the salt wastes of the Dead Sea shore, a red ribbon tied around its horns - the crimson thread of sin from Isaiah 1:18 ('Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be white as snow') - and the mountains of Edom glowing red on the horizon. The goat's posture is ambiguous: it stands but appears exhausted, its head lowered, its gaze meeting the viewer with an expression that Hunt's contemporaries described as almost unbearably poignant. A skull lies in the salt foreground.
Artist and Commission
Hunt began the work without a commission during his 1854 Palestinian expedition, traveling to the Dead Sea specifically because of its identification with the Azazel wilderness in typological Protestant tradition. He worked on location despite extreme physical danger, the salt flats poisonous and the heat extreme. The finished large version was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856 to deeply divided reception: some critics found it sublime, others found a painting of a goat in a landscape without obvious narrative action incomprehensible. Hunt wrote a long explanatory text that accompanied the exhibition, arguing the typological connection between the scapegoat and Christ's atoning death, but many viewers remained baffled. The purchase price was substantial, and Hunt considered it his greatest painting.
Iconography
The scapegoat stands in a field of crystallized salt that glitters like diamonds and bones simultaneously - a surface of terrifying beauty. The red ribbon on its horns, the only warm color in the cold landscape, draws the eye inexorably to the animal's head and face. Hunt was photographically precise about every physical detail: the texture of the goat's wool, the precise color of the salt, the atmospheric haze over the Edomite mountains. The result is a world of pure typological theology: the goat is simultaneously a real animal in a real place and the bearer of all human sin in all times, the figure of Christ as sin-bearer from 2 Corinthians 5:21 ('God made him who had no sin to be sin for us'). The skull in the foreground intensifies the identification with death: the goat will not survive its expulsion. The dead tree on the left echoes the tree of death standard in Crucifixion imagery.
Art Historical Significance
The Scapegoat is athe most ambitious and most deeply strange of all Pre-Raphaelite religious paintings. Unlike Hunt's The Light of the World or Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents, it offers no human figures, no narrative action in the conventional sense, and no visual cue to narrative identification beyond the red ribbon - yet it remains overwhelming in its emotional force. The painting demonstrates the Pre-Raphaelite program of truth to nature carried to an extreme: the landscape's accuracy is so complete that it becomes supernatural, the real and the typological fusing in the glittering salt. It anticipates Symbolism in its use of an isolated object in a landscape as the vehicle for metaphysical meaning, prefiguring works by Arnold Bocklin and Fernand Khnopff.
Theological Interpretations
The typological reading Hunt intended connects Leviticus 16 to the Christian doctrine of substitutionary atonement: as the scapegoat bore the sins of Israel into the wilderness, so Christ bore the sins of humanity in his death. This typological framework was standard in Victorian evangelical Protestant theology and in commentary traditions going back to the church fathers. The painting visualizes the isolation and suffering of the sin-bearer with a directness that more conventional Crucifixion images rarely achieve, because the suffering is rendered through the body and gaze of an animal rather than a human. Jewish readers find in the painting a powerful visual meditation on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and the theology of collective purification that the Leviticus ritual embodies independently of any Christian typological reading.
Legacy
The Scapegoat has been enormously influential in discussions of typological art, Victorian religious culture, and the representation of suffering in painting. Its influence can be traced in Francis Bacon's isolated figures in bleak spaces, in Lucian Freud's unflinching animal studies, and in twentieth-century Expressionist painting that uses animal subjects to carry human emotional weight. The painting also contributed to the rich English literary and cultural use of the scapegoat metaphor - a metaphor so deeply embedded in English usage (the word itself, from the King James Bible, has become purely secular) that its specific origins in Leviticus 16 are often forgotten. The painting returns it to its theological roots.
Visiting the Work
The large version of The Scapegoat hangs in the Manchester Art Gallery, where it is part of the permanent Pre-Raphaelite collection. The smaller version is in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, near Liverpool. Manchester Art Gallery's Pre-Raphaelite holdings are among the finest in the world and include other major Hunt works, making it the best single destination for understanding his art. Both versions are periodically lent for major exhibitions on Victorian painting and biblical typology.