1827-1910 British William Holman Hunt Galleries 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, 1851Hunt'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), having toured the world. 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 recognise 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.  Related Paintings of William Holman Hunt :. | The Light of the World | The Awakening Conscience | The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple | Being English coasts | Unsere englische Kuste |
Related Artists:
Jacob Maris
(August 25, 1837, The Hague - August 7, 1899, Karlsbad) was a Dutch painter, who with his brothers Willem and Matthijs belonged to what has come to be known as the Hague School of painters. Maris studied at the Antwerp Academy, and subsequently in Hubertus van Hove's studio during a stay in Paris from 1865 till 1871. He returned to Holland when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and died there in August 1899. Though he painted, especially in early life, domestic scenes and interiors invested with deeply sympathetic feeling, it is as a landscape painter that Maris excelled. He was the painter of bridges and windmills, of old quays, massive towers, and level banks; even more was he the painter of water, and misty skies, and chasing clouds. In all his works, whether in water or oil color, and in his etchings, the subject is always subordinate to the effect. His art is suggestive rather than decorative, and his force does not seem to depend on any preconceived method, such as a synthetical treatment of form or gradations of tone. And yet, though his means appear so simple, the artist's mind seems to communicate with the spectator's by directness of pictorial instinct, and we have only to observe the admirable balance of composition and truthful perspective to understand the sure knowledge of his business that underlies such purely impressionist handling.
Richard Wilson
Welsh Romantic Painter, ca.1713-1782 was a Welsh landscape painter, and one of the founder members of the Royal Academy in 1768. Wilson has been described as '...the most distinguished painter Wales has ever produced and the first to appreciate the aesthetic possibilities of his country.' Wilson is considered to be the father of landscape painting in Britain. The son of a clergyman, Wilson was born in Penegoes, Montgomeryshire. The family was an old and respected one, and Wilson was first cousin to Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden. In 1729 he went to London where he began as a portrait painter, under the apprentership of an obscure artist, Thomas Wright. From 1750 to 1757 he was in Italy and adopted landscape on the advice of Francesco Zuccarelli. Painting in Italy and afterwards in England, he was the first major British painter to primarily concentrate on landscape. He composed well, but saw and rendered only the general effects of nature thereby creating a personal, ideal style influenced by Claude Lorrain and the Dutch landscape tradition. According to John Ruskin, he "paints in a manly way, and occasionally reaches exquisite tones of colour." He concentrated on painting Italianate landscapes and landscapes based upon classsical literature, but when his painting The Destruction of the Children of Niobe (c.1759-60) won high acclaim he gained many commissions from wealthy families seeking classical potrayals of their estates.
BOEL, Pieter
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1622-1674 Flemish painter, draughtsman and etcher. He came from an artistic family: his father Jan Boel (1592-1640), was an engraver, publisher and art dealer; his uncle Quirin Boel I was an engraver; and his brother Quirin Boel II (1620-40) was also a printmaker. Pieter was probably apprenticed in Antwerp to Jan Fyt, but may have studied previously with Frans Snyders. He then went to Italy, probably visiting Rome and Genoa, where he is supposed to have stayed with Cornelis de Wael. None of Boel's work from this period is known. In 1650 he became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke (having given his first name as Jan, not Pieter). His marriage to Maria Blanckaert took place at about the same time. Boel dated only a few of his paintings, making it difficult to establish a chronology. He is best known for his hunting scenes, some of which clearly show his debt to Snyders, but the dominant influence on his work was that of Fyt, particularly evident in his emphatic brushwork. However, Boel was more restrained both in his treatment and in his handling of outline. He also borrowed the theme of open-air hunting still-lifes (e.g. Feathered Game with Three Dogs; Madrid, Prado) from Fyt, but he painted other subjects as well, such as the monumental Vanitas Still-life (e.g. 1633; Lille, Mus. B.-A.).