William Holman Hunt

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(b London, 2 April 1827; d London, 7 Sept 1910). English painter.

He worked as an office clerk in London from 1839 to 1843, attending drawing classes at a mechanics' institute in the evenings and taking weekly lessons from the portrait painter Henry Rogers. Holman Hunt overcame parental opposition to his choice of career in 1843, and this determined attitude and dedication to art could be seen throughout his working life. In July 1844, at the third attempt, he entered the Royal Academy Schools. His earliest exhibited works, such as Little Nell and her Grandfather (exh. British Institution, 1846; Sheffield, Graves A.G.), reveal few traces of originality, but the reading of John Ruskin's Modern Painters in 1847 was of crucial importance to Holman Hunt's artistic development. It led him to abandon the ambitious Christ and the Two Marys (Adelaide, A.G. S. Australia) in early 1848, when he realized its traditional iconography would leave his contemporaries unmoved. His next major work, the Flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry (1848; London, Guildhall A.G.), from John Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes', though displaced into a medieval setting, dramatized an issue dear to contemporary poets and central to Holman Hunt's art: love and youthful idealism versus loyalty to one's family. His first mature painting, it focuses on a moment of psychological crisis in a cramped and shallow picture space. The Keatsian source, rich colours and compositional format attracted the attention of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, leading to his friendship with Holman Hunt and thus contributing to the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB; see PRE-RAPHAELITISM) in the autumn of 1848.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The English painter William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) was one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the only one to remain faithful to its precepts throughout his life.

William Holman Hunt was born in London. His father, a warehouse manager, reluctantly allowed him to enter the Royal Academy schools in 1844, where he met John Everett Millais. Profoundly influenced by his discovery of John Keats and his reading of John Ruskin's Modern Painters in 1847, Hunt developed a new approach to painting which involved the expression of significant moral ideas in a completely natural manner. To this end he evolved an intensely realistic technique, using brilliant, clear colors on a white ground instead of the traditional dark underpainting. These new ideas are embodied in his illustration inspired by Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Despite Ruskin's defense of the brotherhood in the Times, the hostile reception of Hunt's paintings in the academy, for example, Christians Sheltering a Priest from the Druids (1850), almost caused him to abandon painting. However, with Ruskin's praise for the Light of the World and the Awakening Conscience (1853), Hunt began to gain recognition, and he turned almost exclusively to the portrayal of religious themes.

Hunt was passionately determined to ensure absolute truth to nature in the rendering of his subjects. He painted most of the Light of the World outside by moonlight, and the Scapegoat (1854) was painted beside the Dead Sea on the first of Hunt's many journeys to the Holy Land in search of authentic settings for his biblical scenes.

In 1865 Hunt married Fanny Waugh; within a year, after the birth of their son, she died. In 1873 he married Edith Waugh. After about 1860 Hunt was acknowledged as a leading English painter, but he became increasingly isolated from contemporary trends by his long absences abroad and his continuing adherence to the ideals and realistic technique of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Following Rossetti's death (1882), Hunt began a vigorous defense of these ideals and of his role in their formation with a series of articles which culminated in his remarkable autobiography (1905-1906).

Although Hunt was obsessed throughout his life with light and its effect on color, his popularity was to a large extent founded on his vivid religious imagery, which received wide circulation in the form of engravings. The Miracle of the Sacred Fire (1899), painted in Jerusalem, shows the same scrupulous attention to minute detail which may have caused his eyesight to fail in the last years.

Hunt was awarded the Order of Merit in 1905, and his importance was recognized in a series of major exhibitions. He died on Sept. 7, 1910.

Further Reading

The most important book on Hunt is his autobiography, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (2 vols., 1905-1906; 2d ed. rev. 1914). Fascinating sidelights on his character are in Diana Holman-Hunt, My Grandmothers and I (1960). Background on the period is provided in Robin Ironside, Pre-Raphaelite Painters (1948), and Graham Reynolds, Victorian Painting (1966).

Additional Sources

Amor, Anne Clark, William Holman Hunt: the true Pre-Raphaelite, London: Constable, 1989.

Hunt, William Holman (1827-1910). Painter. The eldest son of a warehouseman, he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1844, where he met Millais and Rossetti, with whom he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Hunt devised the technique of the brotherhood, using bright colours with no strong contrasts of light and shade. Among his best-known works were The Light of the World and The Hireling Shepherd, which were reproduced in great numbers in Victorian Britain.

William Holman Hunt
Self-portrait, 1867, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Born	2 April 1827(1827-04-02) Cheapside, London
Died	7 September 1910 (aged 83) Kensington, London
Nationality	British
Occupation	painter

William Holman Hunt OM (2 April 1827 – 7 September 1910) was an English painter, and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Contents 1 Life and work 2 Gallery (chronological) 3 References in literature 4 Media 5 See also 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links

Life and work

Hunt's intended middle name was "Hobman", which he disliked intensely. He chose to call himself Holman when he discovered that his middle name had been misspelled this way after a clerical error at his baptism at the church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Ewell.^[1] Though his surname is "Hunt", his fame in later life led to the inclusion of his middle name as part of his surname, in the hyphenated form "Holman-Hunt", by which his children were known.

After eventually entering the Royal Academy art schools, having initially been rejected, Hunt rebelled against the influence of its founder Sir Joshua Reynolds. He formed the Pre-Raphaelite movement in 1848, after meeting the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Along with John Everett Millais they sought to revitalise art by emphasising the detailed observation of the natural world in a spirit of quasi-religious devotion to truth. This religious approach was influenced by the spiritual qualities of medieval art, in opposition to the alleged rationalism of the Renaissance embodied by Raphael. He had many pupils including Robert Braithwaite Martineau (best known for his work "Last Days in the Old Home") who was a moderately successful painter although he died young.

The Hireling Shepherd, 1851

Hunt's works were not initially successful, and were widely attacked in the art press for their alleged clumsiness and ugliness. He achieved some early note for his intensely naturalistic scenes of modern rural and urban life, such as The Hireling Shepherd and The Awakening Conscience. However, it was with his religious paintings that he became famous, initially The Light of the World (1851-1853, now in the chapel at Keble College, Oxford; a later version (1900) toured the world and now has its home in St Paul's Cathedral. In the mid 1850s Hunt travelled to the Holy Land in search of accurate topographical and ethnographical material for further religious works, and to “use my powers to make more tangible Jesus Christ’s history and teaching”^[2]; there he painted The Scapegoat, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple and The Shadow of Death, along with many landscapes of the region. Hunt also painted many works based on poems, such as Isabella and Lady of Shalott. He eventually built his own house in Jerusalem^[3].

All these paintings were notable for their great attention to detail, their hard vivid colour and their elaborate symbolism. These features were influenced by the writings of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, according to whom the world itself should be read as a system of visual signs. For Hunt it was the duty of the artist to reveal the correspondence between sign and fact. Out of all the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Hunt remained most true to their ideals throughout his career. He eventually had to give up painting because failing eyesight meant that he could not get the level of quality that he wanted. His last major work, The Lady of Shalott, was completed with the help of an assistant (Edward Robert Hughes).

Hunt married twice. After a failed engagement to his model Annie Miller, he married Fanny Waugh, who later modelled for the figure of Isabella. When she died in childbirth in Italy he sculpted her tomb at Fiesole, having it brought down to the English Cemetery, beside the tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. His second wife, Edith, was Fanny's sister. At this time it was illegal in Britain to marry one's deceased wife's sister, so Hunt was forced to travel abroad to marry her. This led to a serious breach with other family members, notably his former Pre-Raphaelite colleague Thomas Woolner, who had once been in love with Fanny and had married Alice, the third sister of Fanny and Edith.

Hunt's autobiography Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905) was written to correct other literature about the origins of the Brotherhood, which in his view did not adequately recognise his own contribution. Many of his late writings are attempts to control the interpretation of his work.

In 1905, he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII. At the end of his life he lived in Sonning-on-Thames. His personal life was the subject of Diana Holman-Hunt's book My Grandfather, his Life and Loves.

Gallery (chronological)

Illustration to Thomas Woolner's poem "My Beautiful Lady (1850)	A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids (1850)	The Awakening Conscience (1853)	The Light of the World (1854)
The Scapegoat (1856)	The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860)	Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1868)	The Shadow of Death (1871)
The Miracle of the Holy Fire (1899)	The Lady of Shalott (1905)

References in literature

• Hunt's painting "The Hireling Shepherd" plays an important if enigmatic role in Brian Aldiss's "antinovel":

Report on probability A (1968, OCLC 44986)

• Other paintings and drawings feature in Aldiss's short story:

The Secret of Holman Hunt and the Crude Death Rate (1975).

• Hunt's painting The Awakening Conscience is implicitly referenced in scenes in Michel Faber's novel:

The Crimson Petal and the White (2002, ISBN 015100692X)

• Hunt's painting The Awakening Conscience is explicitly referenced in Evelyn Waugh's novel:

Brideshead Revisited (1945, OCLC 964336)

• The version of his painting The Light of the World which hangs in St. Paul's Cathedral, London and a print of that work are both mentioned in Alan Hollinghurst's novel:

The Line of Beauty (2004, ISBN 1582345082)

• Reproductions of Hunt's paintings are hung by the highly religious character Grandmamma in Lawrence Durrell's first novel:

Pied Piper of Lovers (1935)

Media

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood have been the subjects of two BBC period dramas. The first, entitled The Love School, was shown in 1975, starring Bernard Lloyd as Hunt. The second was Desperate Romantics, in which Hunt is played by Rafe Spall. It was first broadcast on BBC 2 Tuesday, 21 July 2009.^[4]

See also

• Category:William Holman Hunt paintings
• English school of painting
• List of Pre-Raphaelite paintings — including the works of William Holman Hunt.

References

1. ^ Amor, Anne Clark, William Holman Hunt: the True Pre-Raphaelite, Constable, London, 1989, p.15
2. ^ Hunt, W.H., Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; London: Macmillan; 1905, vol. 1 p 349
3. ^ http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/whh/plates/house.html
4. ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/08_august/07/romantics.shtml

Further reading

• Maas, Jeremy (1984). Holman Hunt and the Light of the World. Ashgate. ISBN 9780859676830. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: William Holman Hunt

Wikisource has original works written by or about: William Holman Hunt

• ArtRenewal.org gallery
• Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery's Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource Large online collection of the works of William Holman Hunt
• 'The Scapegoat' (1854) at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight
• William Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat: Rite of Forgiveness/Transference of Blame
• William Holman Hunt in the "History of Art" — a paper by Albert Boime published originally in The Art Bulletin 84 no1 94-114 Mr 2002.
• Phryne's list of pictures by Hunt in accessible UK collections
• The Pre-Raph Pack Discover more about the artists, the techniques they used and a timeline spanning 100 years.

Persondata
NAME	Hunt, William Holman
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Pre-Raphaelite artist
DATE OF BIRTH	2 April 1827
PLACE OF BIRTH	London
DATE OF DEATH	7 September 1910
PLACE OF DEATH	London

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