The Ugliest Painting of Jesus, Mary and Joseph Ever Made

December 24, 2019 5:22 AM

Just in time for Christmas, @IronSpike (previously, etc.) explains how much "Christ in the House of His Parents" by Sir John Everett Millais was hated by just about everyone in 1850, and why that was precisely the point.
posted by How the runs scored (28 comments total)

The painting linked lower down in the thread is William Holman Hunt's The Shadow of Death, which adopts a similar approach (and note the very atypical Virgin, in an attempt at "authentic" dress for the period and with muscular arms; this is a woman who does hard work outdoors). Anyway, I show students Christ in the House of His Parents when I teach Pre-Raphaelite poetry, and it is difficult to reconstruct the shock value, although if you show enough Renaissance paintings of Christ with his family they get the idea. It's usually easier for them to get what's eye-popping about D. G. Rossetti's take on the Annunciation, Ecce Ancilla Domini, because the Virgin (modeled by Christina Rossetti) is so obviously threatened and upset.
posted by thomas j wise at 5:45 AM on December 24, 2019 [18 favorites]

Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat is the single worst painting in Manchester City Art Gallery, a building almost entirely full of pre-Raphaelite Christmas cards.
It's totally metal though.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:16 AM on December 24, 2019 [10 favorites]

Threadreader link to article for those of you for which a tweet storm is like getting stabbed in the eyeball by Jesus Christ himself.
posted by drivingmenuts at 6:35 AM on December 24, 2019 [15 favorites]

So, this might be coming from the fact that I've never actually studied art -- all I know of art comes from visiting museums, galleries, and cathedrals -- but I think the thing that struck me the most at first glance is Jesus's age in this painting. Again, this may come from my lack of background in art, but I can't think of too many other paintings where you see Jesus as an awkward adolescent. Like, you see lots of paintings of him as a baby, and then you see him as a grownup, doing his Jesus thing, and then you see him suffering on the cross, but I can't think of too many other examples of Awkward Teenage Jesus. Maybe that's part of the realism of this work? Like yes, Jesus was once an awkward young teen, who had a mother who was weighed down by life and worried about him. If anything, that makes me feel more connected to this story tradition from a religion that I didn't grow up in.
posted by panama joe at 6:37 AM on December 24, 2019 [5 favorites]

I know this is really normalized, but it’s also really striking to me that even artistic rebels obsessed with realism and tweaking the sensibilities of normies portray Jesus and his parents as white Europeans and not as the brown folks they obviously were.
posted by overglow at 7:01 AM on December 24, 2019 [15 favorites]

It is curious that this workshop, complete with authentic woodworking tools and a bench with a pattern clearly meant for planing should lack any visible handplanes. More analysis (of this and a John Hill painting) from a wood worker's perspective at Lost Arts Press.
posted by St. Oops at 7:04 AM on December 24, 2019 [6 favorites]

It does seem pretty rebellious to make Jesus a ginger, though.
posted by Flannery Culp at 7:07 AM on December 24, 2019 [7 favorites]

Brilliant. What an art expert, and an expert tweeter, too.
posted by Mrs Potato at 7:16 AM on December 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

Yeah I'm having a hard time getting past Jesus as a redhead.

If you don't know Iron Spike, she's awesome. I know her best as a comic book artist and publisher, including some fun smutty comics. She gave a great talk at XOXO in 2015 where she talks about making a business work publishing comics from underrepresented minorities. I had no idea close readings of 19th century paintings were another part of her expertise.
posted by Nelson at 7:40 AM on December 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

~It does seem pretty rebellious to make Jesus a ginger, though.
~Yeah I'm having a hard time getting past Jesus as a redhead.

Really? I'm having a hard time thinking of any depiction of adult, white Jesus not having a flowing mane of noticeably red-to-orange hues/highlights. Being straight-up ginger as a boy would seem to make sense given that particular worldview.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:49 AM on December 24, 2019 [4 favorites]

The prototypical 20th century white Jesus (Warner Sallman's Head of Christ) has brown hair. Or maybe very dark blond, depending on how you read the lighting.
posted by jedicus at 8:10 AM on December 24, 2019

Straight-up redheaded Jesus, as opposed to Jesus with artful red highlights, was shocking because the medieval iconography of Jews = redheads still persisted--hence the antisemitic review linked in the Twitter thread. (Dickens' Fagin is a redhead, and it was still customary to perform Shylock in a red wig.)
posted by thomas j wise at 8:16 AM on December 24, 2019 [24 favorites]

I will always be a fan of the painting in question if only because of how Crass appropriated the head of boy Jesus for:

Christ - The Poster

The sort of coddled suburban kid, lower left.
posted by philip-random at 8:39 AM on December 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

Christ - The Poster

a little bigger
posted by philip-random at 8:54 AM on December 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

I was not distressed by people looking ugly as I was by the idea that everyone in the carpenter shop is barefoot. Sandals were a thing!
posted by emjaybee at 8:57 AM on December 24, 2019 [4 favorites]

Also, if ever the redheads weren't Jewish, they were Irish.
posted by dinty_moore at 8:57 AM on December 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

Dickens was such a dick.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 8:57 AM on December 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

Bit of a digression here: a good article on the anti-Semitism of Dickens: https://jewishcurrents.org/charles-dickenss-anti-semitism/
posted by splitpeasoup at 10:05 AM on December 24, 2019 [3 favorites]

I can't think of too many other paintings where you see Jesus as an awkward adolescent.
Is it just because the non-apocryphal gospels skip over that too? For ages between baby and adult, you'd end up painting scenes from Thomas.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 10:44 AM on December 24, 2019 [3 favorites]

It was raining it was cold,
West Bethlehem was no place for a twelve year old
So he packed his bags and headed out
To find out what the world's about...
posted by elizilla at 11:59 AM on December 24, 2019 [3 favorites]

There's one episode of the life of Jesus between babyhood and adulthood in the bible, it's the "Christ among the Doctors" scene in Luke 2. There's been some art of it.
posted by sukeban at 12:09 PM on December 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

Oh yeah that’s the one episode in the gospels where Jesus is also kind of a Petulant Youth because when Mary and Joseph, panicked from searching for their son (they apparently had no idea he had wondered off to hold a theological dispute with the local clergy), try to chastise him for not telling them where he was going to be and he (in my humble interpretation) testily replies in only the way an adolescent could reply by essentially saying “duh, don’t you guys know I would be out doing my REAL DAD’s business”. It’s the snottiest messianic quote ever :)
posted by Doleful Creature at 12:45 PM on December 24, 2019 [9 favorites]

also also Joseph and Mary must have been really loving and patient parents because having the ACTUAL SON OF GOD as your as your kid must have been sort of impossible
posted by Doleful Creature at 12:48 PM on December 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

I love this so much.

The funny thing is, the Pre-Raphaelites are STILL disliked by the mainstream art world. When I was an undergrad, then HEAD of Bard's art department Judy Pfaff told me that I shouldn't like them.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 1:14 PM on December 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

METAFILTER: the snottiest messianic quote ever
posted by philip-random at 1:21 PM on December 24, 2019 [2 favorites]

Yeah, Christ the Kid gets up to all sorts of shenanigans in the Apocrypha.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:49 PM on December 24, 2019

Christ the Kid gets up to all sorts of shenanigans

Joseph: JESUS CHRIST, what the fuck did you do that for?

JC: that’s my name, “pops”. Watch it with the lingo, bub, I’ll tell Child Services on you

Joseph: JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH why I oughta

(Homer chases Bart offstage)
posted by mwhybark at 5:09 PM on December 24, 2019 [1 favorite]

Dickens was such a dick.

Millais got his revenge, though: when Dickens died, his family immediately hired Millais to come draw his death portrait.
posted by mabelstreet at 1:11 AM on December 28, 2019 [1 favorite]