The Dead Sea from Siloam

William Holman Hunt 

Date: 1854-55 

Materials: Watercolour and bodycolour over pencil

Winter in Jerusalem

In the winters of 1854-5 and 1855-6, Hunt embarked on a series of watercolours of Jerusalem  and its surrounding landscape, working up initial pencil sketches into brilliantly coloured finished pictures. He first visited the Dead Sea in October 1854, to work on the famous painting of 'The Scapegoat' (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight).

Five of these watercolours were eventually shown  as a sequence (in  'arabesque' frames of the artist's design), in a separate room at the London gallery where 'The Finding of the Saviour'  was first exhibited in 1861.

Praise in the Athenaeum

Writing in the 'Athenaeum' magazine, F.G.Stephens noted this watercolour's "purple shadows and zones of light", especially admiring the effect of "a bar of faintest white in the mid-distance, indicating the Dead Sea, whose mist intervenes like a trembling veil between us". 

The other four watercolours of the series have remained together, and are now in the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester.