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William
Holman Hunt (1827-1910) is an English painter, born in London. In 1844,
he was admitted as a student to the Royal Academy, where he met John
Millais and Dante Gabriel
Rossetti. For some time he shared a studio with Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
and the pair, along with Millais and a few others, who had a common contempt
of contemporary English art and its academic rules, started the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, which aimed at restoring English painting to its former heights.
John Ruskin supported the group and supplied a theoretical foundation for
its aims.
Hunt believed
that renewal of art must involve a return to honored religious and moral
ideals, and these became the center of his work. He used biblical subjects;
to paint scenery for these themes he visited Palestine several times, see
The
Scapegoat (1856) and The Finding
of Savior in the Temple (1860). He also frequently took themes
from old English myths and sagas, from Shakespeare, and Keats, filling
them with an intense symbolism in which every small detail contributed
to the picture's message and which is not easy to understand to a modern
viewer. The years 1866-1868, he worked in Florence.
At first Victorian England
did not accept his works. Thus The Awakening
Conscience (1853) infuriated the public; it was normal for
a Victorian man to keep a mistress, but nobody spoke about it aloud and
who was this Hunt to accuse others? When the public gradually grew to accept
to Hunt his work was highly regarded. In 1905, he received the Order of
Merit. Hunt's Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
(1905) is a valuable record of the movement.
Note
London Bridge on the Night of
the Wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The Prince of Wales
(Bertie) took his bride, Princess Alexandra of Denmark, to the altar on
March 10, 1863. The day was made a national holiday, and festivities of
all sorts were held up and down the country.
See: William Holman Hunt. London Bridge
on the Night of the Wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales.
Bibliography:
My
grandfather, his wives and loves by Diana Holman-Hunt. Norton.
William
Holman Hunt : the true Pre-Raphaelite by Anne Clark Amor. Constable.
A
Pre-Raphaelite Friendship : The Correspondence of William Holman Hunt and
John Lucas Tupper (Nineteenth-Century Studies) by James H.
Coombs. Umi Research Pr, July 1986.