A Christ that confounds expectations

English painter John Everett Millais’ Christ in the House of His Parents seems at first a rather straightforward depiction of an event which could have easily taken place as Jesus was growing up in His father’s carpenter shop. He has cut His hand on a nail, and His mother comforts Him with a kiss while Joseph examines the wound: a prefiguration of the wounds Jesus would suffer at His Passion. The picture is full of precise and closely observed detail—the careworn body of Joseph (Millais used an actual carpenter as his model), the woodworking tools on the back wall, the shavings strewn on the floor—but it caused an immense controversy when it was shown at the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1850.

Millais was part of a group of young artists and writers who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Only a few years before, they had embarked on a mission to rid English art of what they saw as a stultifying concern with com­position, superficial perfection, and an idealized standard of beauty, which had been the prevailing mode of art in England since the Renaissance. The Pre-Raphaelites sought to revive what they saw as the medieval principles of directness and honesty, which they couldn’t find in the conventionalized art of their period. In this sense they were one of the art world’s first avant-garde movements, and their influence can still be felt in hyperrealist art of today.

The Youth of Our Lord Painters / Alamy

The Pre-Raphaelites were very deliberate in their methods. Instead of using professional models, they had friends and relatives sit for them, claiming this was a more accurate way of portraying common people. They deliberately sought to flout the received conventions of pictorial organization. In their pictures, every detail is significant and worthy of the painter’s notice, and many of those details carried symbolic meaning. All of these practices went against the prevailing wisdom of the 19th-century art world, and the Pre-Raphaelites quickly drew the ire of the establishment.

Millais’ Holy Family are not archetypes of quiet dignity, beauty, and grace: They are real people, situated in a real environment. The critics of the time were not prepared to accept such an image. Christ in the House of His Parents was savagely attacked in the art press; critics objected to the excessive realism, the signs of poverty and disease in the Holy Family, and the unexalted, messy milieu in which they were shown. According to the accepted attitude of the day, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus should not have been painted in such a less-than-ideal state. The critics complained that the picture exalted plainness and even ugliness—the wood shavings on the floor are painted with the same degree of detail as the Christ child. No less a public figure than Charles Dickens felt the need to publicly criticize the painting, singling out the depiction of Mary as being “horrible in her ugliness.” The reviewer for The Times said the picture was “plainly revolting.”

Head of Christ, as shown on a plaque Steverts / Getty Images

How we choose to depict the deity reveals much about our own attitudes. Compare Millais’ painting with, for instance, Warner Sallman’s idealized Head of Christ or even John Rogers Herbert’s The Youth of Our Lord, which undoubtedly influenced Millais’ work. These pictures show Christ and His surroundings as clean, beautiful, orderly, and worthy of our attention. But it is important to remember that, during His early years in Nazareth, Jesus would have been indistinguishable from the average person. His childhood would have seemed a normal one to most observers. Besides His family, who would have remembered the strange circumstances of His birth, who would have noticed the presence of the Savior?

If we’re honest with ourselves we must admit that we, too, would have overlooked the Savior of the world, growing up in His parents’ carpenter shop. The failure of the art critics of 1850 was a failure to accept that Jesus was not presented to the world in an idealized, physically perfect state. “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him,” we are told in Isaiah 53:2. Are we willing to accept a Christ whose appearance, like His teaching, confounds our expectations?

—William Collen is an independent researcher who writes RUINS, a Substack blog discussing art and aesthetic theory from a Christian perspective