William Holman Hunt
Paintings
The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple
Tuscan Girl Plaiting Straw
Christ and the two Marys
Study of a bloodhound
William Holman Hunt
The Lantern Makers Courtship. A Street Scene in Cairo
The Triumph of the Innocents
The flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the drunkenness attending the revelry
The Lantern Maker's Courtship, A Street Scene in Cairo
Drawings
Female Nude. Study from behind
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Christ and the two Marys
William Holman Hunt OM (2 April 1827 – 7 September 1910) was an English painter, and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Biography
William Holman Hunt, William Blake Richmond
William Holman Hunt changed his middle name from "Hobman" to Holman when he discovered that a clerk had misspelled the name after his baptism at the church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Ewell.[1] 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.
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 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 The Lady of Shalott. He eventually built his own house in Jerusalem[3]
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 works, The Lady of Shalott and a large version of The Light of the World were completed with the help of his assistant Edward Robert Hughes.
Artistic style
His paintings were notable for their great attention to detail, vivid colour and 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 was always keen to maximise the popular appeal and public visibility of his works.[4]
Awards and commemoration
Hunt published an autobiography in 1905.[5] Many of his late writings are attempts to control the interpretation of his work. That year, 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.[6]
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was depicted in two BBC period dramas. The first, The Love School, in 1975, starred Bernard Lloyd as Hunt. The second was Desperate Romantics, in which Hunt is played by Rafe Spall.[7]
Facing Mar Elias Monastery is a stone bench erected by the wife of the painter, who painted some of his major works at this spot. The bench is inscribed with biblical verses in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and English.
Partial list of works
A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids (1850)
Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1851)
The Awakening Conscience (1853)
The Light of the World (1854)
The Scapegoat (1856)
The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860)
The Shadow of Death (1871)
The Importunate Neighbour (1895)
The Miracle of the Holy Fire (1899)
References
Amor, Anne Clark (1989). William Holman Hunt: the True Pre-Raphaelite. London: Constable. p. 15. ISBN 0094687706.
Hunt, W.H., Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; London: Macmillan; 1905, vol. 1 p 349
Victorian Web
Judith Bronkhurst, ‘Hunt, William Holman (1827–1910)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
British watercolours in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 26 August 2014.
BBC, BBC Drama Production presents Desperate Romantics for BBC Two
Further reading
Landow, George (1979). William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-02196-8.
Maas, Jeremy (1984). Holman Hunt and the Light of the World. Ashgate. ISBN 978-0-85967-683-0.
Bronkhurst, Judith (2006). William Holman Hunt : A Catalogue Raisonné. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-10235-2.
Lochnan, Katharine (2008). Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision. Art Gallery of Toronto. ISBN 978-1-894243-57-5.
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