From the sublime to the meticulous: Art, anthropology and Victorian pilgrimage to Palestine

This essay focuses on practices of representing the Holy Land, as performed by Protestant British travellers during the Victorian and immediately post-Victorian era. I argue that traveller-artists of the period, such as the Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt, promoted a realist aesthetic that combined spiritual and ethnographic sensibilities in its depiction of sacred scenes. Similar concerns are evident in the writings of nineteenth-century pilgrims to Palestine, who wrestle with issues of "participation" and "observation" in relation to topographical and cultural landscapes that are exotic and yet already rendered partially familiar through biblical narrative. In conclusion, some parallels are drawn with aspects of representation and fieldwork evident among early anthropologists.