The Scapegoat

Charles Henry Mottram

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This grand reproductive engraving has been called "Mottram's greatest tour de force." It is based on a painting by Holman Hunt that caused a sensation when shown at the Royal Academy in 1856. The artist recorded the Dead Sea setting during a visit to Syria and Palestine in 1854, offering viewers a sense of the reality of the Holy Land with an Old Testament subject of ritualized sacrifice that Protestant viewers saw as a symbolic precedent for the sufferings of Jesus. In 1896 Ford Madox Brown wrote that "Hunt's 'Scapegoat' requires to be seen to be believed" since "only then can it be understood how, by the might of genius, out of an old goat, and some saline incrustations, can be made one of the most tragic and impressive works in the annals of art." The publisher Henry Graves worked with Mottram on numerous occasions to produce prints of high quality issued in large editions to appeal to a wide public.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art