important pictures, it was the work of years. Many causes contributed to the delay in its completion, including a sentence of what was tantamount to excommunication (afterwards revoked) passed on all Jews acting as models. Thousands crowded to see this picture, which was exhibited in London and in many English provincial towns. It was purchased for £5500, and is now in the Birmingham Municipal Art Gallery. Holman Hunt’s next great religious picture was “The Shadow of Death” (exhibited separately in 1873), an imaginary incident in the life of our Lord, who, lifting His arms with weariness after labour in His workshop, throws a shadow on the wall as of a man crucified, which is perceived by His mother. This work was presented to Manchester by Sir William Agnew. Meanwhile there had appeared at the Royal Academy in 1861 “A Street in Cairo: The Lanternmaker’s Courtship,” and in 1863 “The King of Hearts,” and a portrait of the Right Hon. Stephen Lushington, D.C.L. In 1866 came “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” “London Bridge on the Night of the Marriage of the Prince of Wales,” and “The Afterglow.” In 1867 Holman Hunt sent a charming head of “A Tuscan Girl” to the Grosvenor Gallery and two pictures to the Royal Academy. These were “Il dolce far niente” and a lifelike study of pigeons in rain called “The Festival of St Swithin,” now in the Taylor Building, Oxford, with many others of this artist’s work. After two years’ absence Holman Hunt returned to Jerusalem in 1875, where he was engaged upon his great picture of “The Triumph of the Innocents,” which proved to be the most serious labour of his life. The subject is an imaginary episode of the flight into Egypt, in which the Holy Family are attended by a procession of the Holy Innocents, marching along the waters of life and illuminated with unearthly light. Its execution was delayed by an extraordinary chapter of accidents. For months Holman Hunt waited in vain for the arrival of his materials, and at last he unfortunately began on an unsuitable piece of linen procured in despair at Jerusalem. Other troubles supervened, and when he arrived in England he found his picture in such a state that he was compelled to abandon it and begin again. The new version of the work, which is somewhat larger and changed in several points, was not completed till 1885. Meanwhile the old picture was relined and so skilfully treated that the artist was able to complete it satisfactorily, and there are now two pictures entitled “The Triumph of the Innocents,” one in the Liverpool, the other in the Birmingham Art Gallery. The pictures exhibited between 1875 and 1885 included “The Ship,” a realistic picture of the deck of a passenger ship by night (1878), and portraits of his son (1880), Sir Richard Owen (1881) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1884). All of these were exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, where they were followed by “The Bride of Bethlehem” (1885), “Amaryllis” and a portrait of his son (tracing a drawing on a window) in 1886. His most important later work is “May-Day, Magdalen Tower,” a record of the service of song which has been held on the tower of Magdalen, Oxford, at sunrise on May-Day from time immemorial. The subject had interested the artist for a great many years, and, after “The Triumph of the Innocents” was completed, he worked at it with his usual devotion, climbing up the tower for weeks together in the early morning to study the sunrise from the top. This radiant poem of the simplest and purest devotion was exhibited at the Gainsborough Gallery in Old Bond Street in 1891. He continued to send occasional contributions to the exhibitions of the Royal Water-Colour Society, to the New Gallery and to the New English Art Club. One of the most remarkable of his later works (New Gallery, 1899) is “The Miracle of Sacred Fire in the Church of the Sepulchre, Jerusalem.”
By his strong and constant individuality, no less than by his peculiar methods of work, Holman Hunt holds a somewhat isolated position among artists. He remained entirely unaffected by all the various movements in the art-world after 1850. His ambition was always “to serve as high priest and expounder of the excellence of the works of the Creator.” He spent too much labour on each work to complete many; but perhaps no painter of the 19th century produced so great an impression by a few pictures as the painter of “The Light of the World,” “The Scapegoat,” “The Finding of our Saviour in the Temple” and “The Triumph of the Innocents”; and his greatness was recognized by his inclusion in the Order of Merit. His History of Pre-Raphaelitism, a subject on which he could speak as a first authority, but not without dissent from at least one living member of the P.R.B., was published in 1905. On the 7th of September 1910 he died in London, and on September 12th his remains, after cremation at Golder’s Green, were buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, with national honours.
See Archdeacon Farrar and Mrs Alice Meynell, “William Holman Hunt, his Life and Work” (Art Annual) (London, 1893); John Ruskin, Modern Painters; The Art of England (Lecture) [consult Gordon Crauford’s Ruskin’s Notes on the Pictures of Mr Holman Hunt, 1886]; Robert de la Sizeranne, La Peinture anglaise contemporaine (Paris, 1895); W. B. Scott, Autobiographical Notes; W. M. Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelite Diaries and Letters; Percy H. Bate, The Pre-Raphaelite Painters (1899); Sir W. Bayliss, Five Great Painters of the Victorian Era (1902). (C. Mo.)
HUNT, WILLIAM MORRIS (1824–1879), American painter,
was born at Brattleboro, Vermont, on the 31st of March 1824.
His father’s family were large landowners in the state. He was
for a time (1840) at Harvard, but his real education began when
he accompanied his mother and brother to Europe, where he
studied with Couture in Paris and then came under the influence
of Jean François Millet. The companionship of Millet had a
lasting influence on Hunt’s character and style, and his work
grew in strength, in beauty and in seriousness. He was the real
introducer of the Barbizon school to America, and he more than
any other turned the rising generation of American painters
towards Paris. On his return in 1855 he painted some of his
most beautiful pictures, all reminiscent of his life in France and
of Millet’s influence. Such are “The Belated Kid,” “Girl at the
Fountain,” “Hurdy-Gurdy Boy,” &c. But the public called
for portraits, and it became the fashion to sit to him, among his
best paintings in this kind being those of William M. Evarts,
Mrs Charles Francis Adams, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke,
William H. Gardner, Chief Justice Shaw and Judge Horace Gray.
Unfortunately many of his paintings and sketches, together
with five large Millets and other art treasures collected by him in
Europe, were destroyed in the great Boston fire of 1872. Among
his later works American landscapes predominated. They also
include the “Bathers”—twice painted—and the allegories for the
senate chamber of the State Capitol at Albany, N.Y., now lost by
the disintegration of the stone panels on which they were painted.
Hunt was drowned at the Isles of Shoals on the 8th of September
1879. His book, Talks about Art (London, 1878), is well known.
His brother, Richard Morris Hunt (1828–1895), the famous architect, was born in Brattleboro, Vermont, on the 31st of October 1828. He studied in Europe (1843–1854), mainly in the École des Beaux Arts at Paris, and in 1854 was appointed inspector of works on the buildings connecting the Tuileries with the Louvre. Under Hector Lefuel he designed the Pavilion de la Bibliothèque, opposite the Palais Royal. In 1855 he returned to New York, and was employed on the extension of the Capitol at Washington. He designed the Lenox Library, the Stuyvesant and the Tribune buildings in New York; the theological library, and Marquand chapel at Princeton; the Divinity College and the Scroll and Key building at Yale; the Vanderbilt mausoleum on Staten Island, and the Yorktown monument. For the Administration Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893 Hunt received the gold medal of the Institute of British Architects. Among the most noteworthy of his domestic buildings were the residences of W. K. Vanderbilt and Henry G. Marquand in New York City; George W. Vanderbilt’s country house at Biltmore, and several of the large “cottages” at Newport, R.I., including “Marble House” and “The Breakers.” He was one of three foreign members of the Italian Society of St Luke, an honorary and corresponding member of the Académie des Beaux Arts and of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He was the first to command respect in foreign countries for American architecture, and was the leader
