The Saviour’s Endurance

Clive Wilmer

Man of Sorrows, by William Dyce

The Man of Sorrows is by the Victorian artist William Dyce. It depicts the temptation in the wilderness but, perhaps surprisingly, includes no representation of the tempter. Jesus turns away from the centre of the composition, as if there were a figure to turn away from, and the harsh rocks remind us of the devil’s first temptation: ‘If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.’ I imagine Jesus as being about to reply: ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’

Dyce was a serious Christian who, as a painter, eschewed the supernatural. The bleakly naturalistic landscape, painted not in Palestine but in his native Scotland, exemplifies a more than passing interest in the science of geology. But in that age of doubt, the geological record represented a challenge to the Biblical account of Creation and therefore to the strength of Christian faith. Compare a quotation from Dyce’s contemporary John Ruskin: ‘If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.’ So the rocks represent a further temptation, one that forces me to re-examine what we understand by ‘every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’.

 Like many Victorian artists, Dyce believed that the close study of nature would reveal sacred truths, though it seemed to risk undermining them. Where landscape was concerned, close study meant painting in the open air. But the study of the human body could only take place in the studio and under a different light. Some would say it is a fault in the picture that, because of this, Jesus does not quite belong in the landscape or indeed in natural light. To speak personally, it strikes me as true to the Gospel story that Jesus should appear both as a human body in the world and as a spirit haunted by desolation. Grim as the image is, it seems to offer us, through the Saviour’s endurance, a release from emptiness. Looking at it as we embark on the season of Lent, I am reminded of a prayer from the service of Evensong: ‘O God… give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give.’