Robert Fisk’s World: A Christian painter who could not see the light in Palestine

He regarded Islam as an iconophobic religion and talked of how Muslims – he differentiated between Turks and Arabs – had a blind spot about looking at things, regarding landscapes as mere places, and paintings as "writing". Nicholas Tromans of Kingston University, London, recalls how Hunt lectured a muezzin in 1855. "When ... I tell him that the Khoran (sic) forbids the representation of living creatures, he seems as much enlightened," Hunt wrote in his diary. Which is not surprising, since the Koran says no such thing. Indeed, there is a painting of the Prophet in a cave in Egypt, a place – along with Lebanon – which had less interest for the Hunt. Arabs, Tromans glumly notes, "cannot participate in the dynamic prophetic capacities to which his art aspired, and ultimately could not be actors in the drama of the transformed Palestine which he imagined".