Self-Portrait
The Eve of St. Agnes
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The Hireling Shepherd
The Scapegoat, one of the paintings Hunt painted after his trips to the Holy Land.
Rossetti's chalk drawing of Hunt's one-time fiance Annie Miller.
Early Life | Formation of the PRB | Symbolic Paintings | Trips
William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais were lifelong friends, yet the two could not have been more different. While Millais was affable, Hunt was proud and difficult to like. He was born in 1827, as the youngest of seven children. His father was a warehouse manager in Cheapside, and ran a very religious household. Hunt spent much time in his childhood reading the Bible. His parents did not encourage drawing, even though he dreamed of being an artist.
At age 12, he left school went to work as a clerk in his father’s office, but hated office work. He still wanted to work professionally as a painter, and even though he wasn’t that naturally talented, he had a very strong imagination and vision. He eventually persuaded his parents to let him enroll at the Royal Academy Schools, so he could learn about art. He was finally accepted as a probationer there after his third attempt. However, he quickly became disillusioned with the Academy's teachings and the current trends in British art, which worshipped Raphael.
Formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Hunt was greatly inspired by reading Ruskin’s second volume of Modern Painters and felt particularly strongly about Ruskin's argument that painters should return to the style of the medieval and early Renaissance painters. He was religious, so he liked the idea of painting with symbolism so that the viewer could interpret metaphors and get more out of the painting that way.
Around this time, he also met and became good friends with Millais, and he shared a studio for a time with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The three were in agreement with Ruskin's ideas, and together with four other writers and artists, they formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Both Millais and Hunt wanted to get paintings in their new style into the 1848 Academy exhibition. Hunt chose the subject of The Eve of St. Agnes, a poem by Keats. He included the mysterious initials “P.R.B.” in the painting. Millais’ painting was not accepted into the exhibition, but Hunt’s was, and was generally well-accepted.
In the exhibit the following summer, both Millais and Hunt exhibited paintings. This time, they were both were met with harsh criticism, Millais' Christ in the House of his Parents, especially. Patrons were also suspicious about the initials "P.R.B." The criticism the Pre-Raphaelites were receiving was deeply depressing to Hunt, who strongly craved recognition for his vision. He even considered moving abroad and living as an expatriate. However, he did soon acquire a small group of supporters, including Ruskin himself and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Combe. Mr. Combe was superintendent of Oxford University Press, and the couple became surrogate parents to Hunt and patrons of the PRB.
While upset that his paintings weren’t receiving more praise, Hunt began to conceive a new one, based on a scene from King Lear but also from the New Testament, Chapter 10 of the Gospel of John, which describes Jesus as the Good Shepherd and all the others who came before him as Bad Shepherds, who left the flock to fend for itself when danger came around.
This painting was entitled The Hireling Shepherd (left), and it features a shepherd boy in the process of seducing a shepherdess while his sheep roam unattended behind him. The moral symbolism of this work is characteristic of Hunt. He wanted to update religious painting and present contemporary Christians with their own iconography. The Hireling Shepherd became one of the best-known Pre-Raphaelite works.
Around the same time, Hunt completed a piece that represented his conversion to religion. This painting was entitled The Light of the World, and it depicts Christ entering the world in the dark through badly untended undergrowth. Hunt spent most of the time working on this painting at night under lamplight, to achieve the greatest degree of realism.
The Light of the World was exhibited in 1853, where it was also criticized for being suspiciously Catholic. Hunt called in Ruskin to defend it and to explain the symbolic meaning. After this, people were so intrigued with it that it went on a national tour. Eventually, it became so popular that, in 1900, Hunt was commissioned to paint a larger copy. This copy then went on a tour of the colonies and was finally presented at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London when it returned.
Another important symbolic work of Hunt’s is The Awakening Conscience, completed in 1853. This is a secular piece, depicting a kept woman’s sudden awareness of her sin, which causes her to leap out of her lover's lap. The painting is full of symbols of the woman’s compromised nature and her growing conscience, such as the cat torturing the bird, the tangled threads of her embroidery, the open window, etc. This painting also apparently infuriated everyone, either because mistresses were common at the time or because they were considered in appropriate as a subject.
In 1852, Hunt applied for membership in the Royal Academy, but was turned down. He started going on tours of the Holy Land, aspiring to view all the sites from the Bible and then to paint them. In his lifetime, he was best known for these religious paintings, which made him comfortably well-off, but still contained the symbolism of the Pre-Raphaelites. Even though he did become better-known, and was even awarded the Order of Merit from the King in 1905, he was too proud to ever apply for Academy membership again.
After a failed engagement to the Pre-Raphaelite model Annie Miller, which probably failed due to her relationship with Rossetti, Hunt married Fanny Waugh in 1865. She was the daughter of a Regent Street chemist who had also modeled for several Pre-Raphaelite paintings. She died in Florence only one year later, after the birth of their son. Hunt then married her younger sister, Edith Waugh. This was illegal in England, so the marriage was conducted in Switzerland, but it led to strong breaches between Hunt and his family.
In his later years, Hunt worked on writings that instructed viewers how to interpret the symbolism of his paintings. He also wrote his autobiography, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which is a valuable documentation of the movement. Hunt ment it to assert his important role in the formation of the style, which he felt had been overlooked.
He died in 1910 in Kensington.
(Information compiled from Artchive, ABC Gallery, ArtMagick & Wikipedia)