Victorian Exodus: Visualising the Old Testament in the Dalziels' Bible Gallery (1881)

Although incomplete, twenty years overdue and a commercial flop, the Dalziels’ Bible Gallery (1881) remains one of the most significant compendiums of Victorian illustration. Rather than the story of Christ, which dominated British religious art, the Dalziels’ illustrations are drawn exclusively from the Old Testament, making it a wholly unique iteration of the Victorian illustrated Bible genre. This chapter considers its use of Old Testament source material, previously marginalised in British Protestant visual culture, and explores the ways the illustrations answer Ruskin’s call to stimulate religious art in a new direction. The Exodus narrative—which is central to the Abrahamic faiths—and its patriarch and prophet, Moses, are given centre-stage in this chapter. Through the Dalziels’ Bible Gallery version of the exodus, this chapter reveals the ways in which the Old Testament represented a distinct category of religious art for artists with renewed social relevance in the nineteenth century.