William Holman Hunt

English painter

• Born: April 2, 1827
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: September 7, 1910
• Place of death: London, England

Hunt’s activities in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and his artistic success outside the Royal Academy allowed him to exert a broadening influence on British art, reforming ideas regarding lighting and color and bringing considerations of content back into primary importance in painting.

Early Life

William Holman Hunt was the oldest child in a family of two sons and five daughters. He was named for his maternal grandfather. His own father, also named William Hunt, was a warehouseman in the Cheapside district. The father took care to introduce his son to art and literature but did not encourage the boy’s interest in art. Until the age of thirteen, Hunt attended private schools, and then he became an assistant to Richard Cobden, a calico printer and minor politician. Dissatisfied with these pursuits, young Hunt gained permission to study art in the evenings, which he proceeded to do in the studio of portrait painter Henry Rogers.

By 1843, Hunt had given up his commercial employment for the full-time study of art, working as a student at the British Museum three days a week and making copies at the National Gallery for two more. After failing his first attempt to gain admission to the Royal Academy schools, he was admitted as a probationer in 1844 and was promoted to full studentship the next year. There Hunt became fast friends with John Everett Millais, a painter two years Hunt’s junior, but one who had already gained recognition for his great promise as a painter. Hunt also formed his first acquaintance with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with whom, along with Millais, he would form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) some years later. Primarily, however, Hunt spent these years learning to paint, and he began exhibiting at the Academy in 1846, with a picture titled Hark! , which he followed the next year with Dr. Rochecliffe Performing Divine Service in the Cottage of Joceline Jocliffe at Woodstock , a scene from a novel by Sir Walter Scott.

In 1848, Hunt first won individual recognition with his Flight of Madeline and Porphyro , adapted from John Keats’s poem The Eve of St. Agnes (1820). This painting attracted the attention of Rossetti, who thought it the year’s best painting and who, as a result, pressed Hunt to allow him to work under Hunt in Hunt’s studio in Fitzroy Square. Thus began both an artistic association and a close personal friendship that would last for nine years. Hunt introduced Rossetti to Millais, and in the fall of 1848 these three, flush with the enthusiasm of their early success, laid down the principles and formed the nucleus of the PRB.

Life’s Work

Hunt was a tall man with striking blue eyes, a high forehead, brown hair, and a long, silky, red-golden beard. He made two major contributions to the history of the fine arts in England. First, Hunt’s position as cofounder of the PRB established him as a leader in the reformation of painting as an art form. With Hunt, Rossetti, and Millais in the lead, the PRB led a revolt against fashionable painting of the time, which emphasized technical perfection at the expense of content. The Pre-Raphaelites vowed to express only important ideas; to paint directly from nature, disregarding the accepted rules of design and color, which had limited artists to a relatively narrow range of colors and lighting effects; and to paint events realistically, as they were likely to have happened, rather than in the idealized, highly refined manner of the day. These three tenets, together with the suspicion aroused by the presence of a secret brotherhood, led to a public outcry against the works of the PRB, but the group gained an able champion in 1851, when John Ruskin came to the defense of Hunt’s Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus , inspired by William Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Ruskin defended what the Pre-Raphaelites were trying to do, and he explained, in the process, that their works were a logical and a positive reaction against some bad influences in English painting. Thus, from 1851 onward, Hunt’s works, as well as those of his fellow Pre-Raphaelites, gained in acceptance and value. More important, however, their principles gained wider and wider acceptance, even though Hunt was perhaps the only Pre-Raphaelite artist to follow them rigorously throughout his career. These early works of the PRB paved the way for later artists such as Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, and for such widely divergent movements as aestheticism and purism, in which idea assumed the ascendancy over style and realism and faithfulness to nature overrode established ideas of composition and design.

In addition to this perhaps purely aesthetic success, Hunt’s personal success in making a living from the proceeds of his art and in doing so outside the Academy blazed a trail for artists who came after him and who also violated the accepted practices of their day. Beginning during the 1850’s, Hunt began to make a good living from his art, even though he showed fewer and fewer paintings at the Royal Academy and even though his work violated accepted standards of composition, color, and design.

By 1854, Hunt’s The Light of the World , a work still widely reproduced, sold for about five hundred pounds, a significant sum of money at that time; The Scapegoat sold for a similar amount in 1856. The best, however, was yet to come. In 1860, when Hunt finished The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple , he sold the painting for fifty-five hundred pounds, and The Shadow of Death brought twice that sum in 1871. These were unheard-of prices for the time, and Hunt’s ability to thrive outside the Royal Academy broke the stranglehold that that body had long exercised on the visual arts. Hunt had brought ideas back into art, and his paintings, most of which explored New Testament themes according to a typological scheme of symbolism, increased in value and popularity as their artist’s methods were vindicated by the increasing public and critical acceptance his work gained.

Hunt’s methods were intimately connected with the success of his painting. His attention to detail, one of the primary traits of Pre-Raphaelitism, resulted from his absolute dedication to accuracy. This principle made him something of a legend, for he insisted on painting on site whenever possible. Thus, his major religious works were painted in Palestine, and they display an immediateness that is missing from most painting of the era, which was done largely from the artist’s often mistaken impression of what such a place must be like.

More than this trademark of authenticity, Hunt’s attention to detail reinforced his typological method, allowing him to exploit a single moment in his subject’s existence to encapsulate that subject’s entire import. In The Shadow of Death, for example, Christ, a young man working in his father’s carpentry shop, stops during the late afternoon to stretch. Behind him, his outstretched arms cast a shadow on the wall, and the shadow falls on a tool rack in such a way that it produces an image of the Crucifixion. In the lower left of the painting kneels the Virgin Mary, who has been looking at the contents of a trunk that is still open before her and in which can be seen the gifts the Magi brought to the child Jesus. However, Mary is no longer looking at the gifts; her attention has been drawn to the shadow behind her, and her position suggests alarm, as if she senses the significance of the shadow on the wall. This one moment, then, condenses a considerable expanse of biblical history, from David, a type of Christ, to the Crucifixion itself, and, through the reference to the twenty-third Psalm, to the Resurrection.

The verse alluded to in the title does celebrate being led through the valley of the shadow of death. Hunt’s method, then, brings not only a remarkable number of physical details into his work but also an impressive density of ideas, so that the painting must literally be explored by the viewer, who is responsible for dealing with all the complex resonances of the allusions in the work. By means of this typological method, Hunt brought ideas back into British art, and this is perhaps his greatest contribution to painting.

Hunt’s personal life, in the meantime, was almost as stormy as his artistic career. Upon returning from his first trip to the Holy Land and soon after he had finished The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, Hunt paid a visit, in the company of his friend and fellow Pre-Raphaelite Thomas Woolner, to the Waugh household, where Woolner had long been courting Fanny Waugh, the favorite daughter of her overprotective father. In the end, she refused Woolner, for she had already become attracted to Hunt, whose attachment to Fanny was tempered by his fear of a scandal involving some indiscreet love letters he had earlier written to Annie Miller, a model who had been much admired among the Brotherhood. The attraction weathered this possible scandal and the initial disapproval of Fanny’s father, and on December 28, 1865, the two were married. A disastrous honeymoon, delayed by Hunt’s insistence on finishing several pictures, followed.

When the couple set out for the Holy Land for a working honeymoon, Fanny was already seven months pregnant. At Marseilles, the ports were closed because of cholera, so the Hunts crossed into Italy via Switzerland, but to no avail, because the same conditions were in effect there. They settled in Florence, where the heat and the effort of sitting for her husband weakened Fanny so that she was unable, ultimately, to recover from the rigors of childbirth. On October 26, 1866, Cyril Benone Holman Hunt was born in Florence, and about two months later, on December 20, Fanny died.

Hunt returned to England, bringing Cyril, who had, in the meantime, been twice almost starved by fraudulent wet nurses. His return led to the discovery that Fanny’s youngest sister, Edith, was and always had been in love with him, and whether she was so much like Fanny or he simply found her attractive in her own right, Hunt found himself in love with her. Their union was proscribed as incestuous by the Affinity Laws, she being Hunt’s sister under the law, so the two decided, reluctantly, to resist their attraction, and Hunt left for another eastern journey, on which he began The Shadow of Death and attempted to put Edith out of his mind. Upon his return, nothing had changed, and the two, after great struggle and vacillation, finally decided to marry, in spite of the laws forbidding their union.

Both families of the couple disowned and disinherited them, but in November of 1875 Edith Waugh married her brother-in-law in Neufchatel, Switzerland, nine years after Fanny’s death. Their marriage would not be recognized in Great Britain until 1907, when the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act received royal approval. Hunt and Edith remained devoted to each other, a happy couple for the rest of his life. He died in 1910, and she survived him by twenty years.

Significance

For the most part, William Holman Hunt’s life is exemplified by his art. A stubborn perfectionist with an intense vision about what art should be and do, Hunt refused to compromise his ideas. His early works, largely misunderstood, did not sell, but rather than change his methods, in 1850 Hunt contemplated giving up art and becoming a farmer. Ruskin’s intervention relieved Hunt’s distress, and increasing acceptance led to greater influence on artists who surrounded or succeeded Hunt. Perhaps Hunt’s greatest aesthetic contributions were in the areas of color, realism, and symbolism. Eschewing the limited color range and chiaroscuro effects of his day, Hunt painted in bright, natural colors, and the lighting in his paintings was as bright or as dark as the actual situation demanded.

In addition, Hunt concentrated on painting a scene the way it really appeared rather than imposing an unnatural conventional design onto the subject. This emphasis on verisimilitude was reinforced by his views on color and lighting, so that his work represents a return to realism, a desertion of the highly stylized artificiality that, Hunt believed, had increasingly marred European painting from the time of Raphael onward. Most important, Hunt brought serious ideas back into painting.

Reacting against the example of such painters as Edwin Landseer (1802-1873), technically accomplished but lacking in substance, Hunt brought content to the foreground of his art. Combining a heightened attention to detail with a pronounced typological symbolism, Hunt produced works that were meaningful in themselves and that made statements with relation to other texts as well, whether those other texts came from literature or the Bible. Thus, Hunt’s greatest works are narrative in nature, informed by texts alluded to in the subject of the painting and, in turn, commented on in the painting itself. This dialogue between texts provides the vehicle for the painting’s statement and for art’s return to an active involvement in the larger context of its culture.

Bibliography

Bennett, Mary. William Holman Hunt. Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery, 1969. The catalog of the Hunt exhibition, this work is indispensable to the serious study of Hunt’s art.

Bronkhurst, Judith. William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2004. An 800-page catalog of Hunt’s work, with separate sections devoted to his oil paintings and his works on paper. Includes an introduction assessing his life, artistic techniques, aims, philosophy, and religious beliefs. The appendixes feature Hunt’s illustrated letters, etchings, and other examples of his work.

Holman-Hunt, Diana. My Grandfather, His Wives and Loves. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1969. This rather luridly titled but quite readable account of Hunt’s private life is also surprisingly well documented, as the author had access to family papers not generally available at the time.

Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1905-1906. 2d rev. ed. London: Chapman and Hall, 1913. Hunt’s account of his career and of the history of the PRB, this book is highly subjective and somewhat self-justifying, but an important primary source of information. The two editions are collated in Bennett’s catalog of the 1969 Hunt exhibition.

Hutton, Timothy. The Pre-Raphaelites. 1970. Reprint. London: Thames and Hudson, 1983. Lavishly illustrated general introduction to Pre-Raphaelite painting and a particularly useful starting place to study Hunt.

Landow, George P. William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. The definitive interpretation of Hunt’s accomplishments in painting. Landow explains Hunt’s typological method and provides detailed and highly insightful explications of Hunt’s paintings and those of other Pre-Raphaelites, most notably Rossetti.

Péteri, Éva. Victorian Approaches to Religion as Reflected in the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003. Examines the religious beliefs of Hunt, Ruskin, Rossetti, and Millais, and how these beliefs are evidenced in their use of Biblical imagery, symbolism, and other artistic techniques.

Prettejohn, Elizabeth. The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. An examination of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and an analysis of the group’s artistic techniques. Discusses the distinctive characteristics of Pre-Raphaelite art and how the movement responded to and commented on its time and place.

Welland, D. S. R. The Pre-Raphaelites in Literature and Art. 1953. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969. Besides a useful general introduction to Pre-Raphaelite art, the book contains selections from writings by and about Pre-Raphaelite artists, poets, and critics.