Moreover, it was at Oxford that the Pre-Raphaelite movement, five or six years earlier, had found some of its first and most generous patrons; such as Mr. James Wyatt, the well-known picture-dealer, who was among Millais’s readiest buyers, but died in 1853, and Mr. Thomas Combe, the University printer, who, through Millais’s influence, purchased Holman Hunt’s youthful and little-known picture, “Christian Priests Escaping from Druid Persecution,” in 1850. About three years later, Holman Hunt was on a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Combe while his greater work, “The Light of the World,” was in process; and at their house he became acquainted with the young curate of St. Paul’s, Oxford; Venables by name. He was a man saintly in face and character; afterwards Bishop of the Bahamas, and long since dead. Whether he actually gave sittings to Hunt, or was avowedly the model for the Christ of the picture, does not appear, but those who knew Venables at the time insist upon the absolute faithfulness of the portraiture. This face it was which certain critics, unable to dissociate their conception of the Saviour from the conventional Raphaelesque type, condemned instantly as “the face of a Judas.” The picture was purchased by Mr. Combe, and subsequently presented by his widow to Keble College, Oxford, where it hangs to-day. Of the difficulties which attended the painting, and of the extraordinary labour bestowed upon it as it slowly grew beneath his hand in the little studio then at Chelsea, Mr. Hunt has given us his own significant record,—how, night after night, when the moon was in a favourable quarter, he would so dispose his curtains and draperies, easels and lamps, as to yield him the peculiar light for which he was striving, and at the same time to afford for curious observers an endless speculation as to the mysterious proceedings of the eccentric young artist within. “The Light of the World” is now perhaps the most familiar, to English eyes, of any Pre-Raphaelite pictures, unless we except the less esoteric “Hugenot” of Millais.