The Boat Theme: a Note to "Shadows Cast by the Light of the World"

George P. Landow, Professor of English and the History of Art, Brown University

[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Victorian Painters —> William Holman Hunt/a> —> Shadows Cast by the "Light of the World"]

Watts, on the other hand, did paint a similar subject to Hunt's "Christ the Pilot" about five years later entitled Love Steering the Boat of Humanity, and Hunt's letter may possibly have led him to modify an original conception. Wilfred Blunt, "England's Michelangelo": A Biography of George Frederic Watts, O. M. R. A., London, 1975, 22s, comments that Watts "rather obscurely celebrated the Boer War with a painting entitled 'Love steering the Boat of Humanity' — the smaller and original version of which is now in Japan, the larger at Compton. 'The Nation's suffering during the war in South Africa,' wrote Mary, 'prompted its conception. Man's condition of conflict in the midst of forces from above and below, the recognition of his own importance to control, yet with the sustaining faith that the hand of Love directs his course.' " [Return to Christ the Pilot.]

Last modified December 2001