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 :. | F.G.Stephens | The Hireling Shepherd (mk09) | The Plain of Esdraelon from the Heights above Nazareth | The Scapegoat | The Plain of Rephaim from Mount Zion (mk46) |
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Justus Sustermans
(28 September 1597 - 23 April 1681), also known as Giusto Sustermans, was a Flemish painter in the Baroque style. He was born in Antwerp and died in Florence. Sustermans is chiefly notable for his portraits of members of the Medici family as he was their court painter. His work can be found in both the Palatina Gallery and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and in many other galleries around the globe. During his lifetime he was feted as the finest portrait painter in Italy.
Josse Lieferinxe
active in Provence 1493-1505/08 was a South Netherlandish painter, formerly known by the pseudonym the Master of St. Sebastian. Originating in the diocese of Cambrai in Hainaut, then part of the territories ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy. Josse Lieferinxe was documented as a "Picard" in the regions of Avignon and Marseille at the end of the fifteenth and in the early sixteenth centuries. He was first mentioned in Provence in 1493. Thus he figures among the painters of the Provençal school, whose most prominent members in an earlier generation had also been from the far north of the French-speaking world Barth lemy d'Eyck and Enguerrand Quarton. In 1503 he married Michelle, a daughter of Jean Changenet, the most prominent painter of Avignon, in whose atelier Lieferinxe may have matured his style. He was last mentioned living in 1505, and in 1508 as deceased. Before he was identified by Charles Sterling who linked his work with a document, his artistic personality was recognized, as the "Master of St. Sebastian", through a former retable of eight scenes depicting the acts and miracles of Saint Sebastian and Saint Roch, protectors against the plague, which was commissioned in 1497 for the church of Nôtre Dame des Accoul's in Marseille. Bernardino Sismondi, who originally received the commission, died, however, before he could finish the work.
Hans von Marees
(24 December 1837 - 5 June 1887) was a German painter. He mainly painted country scenes in a realistic style. Von Marees was born in Elberfeld, Germany. At age 16, he was sent to the Berlin Academy. In 1857, he moved to Munich. In 1869, he visited France, the Netherlands and Spain. He served in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) and then lived in Berlin and Dresden for a while. In 1873, he decorated the library walls of the newly built Naples Zoological Institute in Italy. The next year, he moved to Florence. He died in Rome at the age of 49 and is buried in the Protestant Cemetery there.