William Holman Hunt (b. 2 April 1827 in Cheapside, London – d. 7
September 1910 in Kensington, London) was a British painter. He was one of the
founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.William Holman Hunt (b. 2 April 1827
in Cheapside, London – d. 7 September 1910 in Kensington, London) was a British
painter. He was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
William Holman Hunt
self-portrait
Born
April 2, 1827(1827-04-02)
London
Died
September 7, 1910 (aged 83)
London
Nationality
British
Occupation
painter
William Holman Hunt (b. 2 April 1827 in
Cheapside, London – d. 7 September 1910 in Kensington, London) was a British
painter. He was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
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 (now
in the chapel at Keble College, Oxford, with a later copy in St Paul's
Cathedral), which toured Britain and the United States. After travelling to the
Holy Land in search of accurate topographical and ethnographical material for
further religious works, Hunt 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.
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 up 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
married Fanny and Edith's third sister Alice.
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 recognize 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.
President Obama errs Thomas Mifflin not
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government began in a Philadelphia Tavern
and the United States 1st federal government ended in a
NYC Tavern!
The Founders convened the government in 11 different capitol buildings and
experienced 15 years of challenges that
included war,
hyper-inflation, a failed
constitution, judicial corruption, armed citizen and U.S. Army rebellions.
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