Biography and creative activities of William Hillman hunt

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BIOGRAPHY AND CREATIVE ACTIVITIES OF WILLIAM HILMAN HUNT

Bagdasaryan A.T.,

Fedulenkova T.N.

The target of my paper is to tell you about the greatest English painter William Holman Hunt, who lived in 19^th - 20^th centuries. He was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

I'm going to tell you about his biography and about his creative activities. This paper includes my power point presentation, witch consists of twenty PC slides, of my speech, of one tests, of a set of question on the topic, of 10 pictures and of the reference list.

This paper was listened to and approved at an English class on April 20^th, 2014 and at the April readings in Vladimir State University n.a. the Stoletov brothers First of all, I want to tell you about the William Holman Hunt. He was the greatest English painter who was born at April 2 in 1827. William was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Hunt changed his middle name from «Hobman» to Holman when he discovered that a clerk had misspelled the name after his baptism at the church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Ewell. [1] 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 Raphaelite movement in 1848, after meeting the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Along with John Everett Millais they sought to revitalize art by emphasizing 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.

William married twice. After a failed engagement to his model Annie Miller, he married Fanny Waugh, who later modeled for the figure of Isabella. When she died in childbirth in Italy he sculpted her tomb 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 once been in love with Fanny and had married Alice, the third sister of Fanny and Edith.

William Holman'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 (1851-1853), now in the chapel at Keble College, Oxford; a later version (1900) toured the world and now has its home in St Paul's Cathedral.

In the mid-1850s Hunt travelled to the Holy Land in search of accurate topographical and ethnographical material for further religious works, and to “use my powers to make more tangible Jesus Christ's history and teaching”, [2] there he 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. He eventually built his own house in Jerusalem [3]

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 works, The Lady of Shalott and a large version of The Light of the World were completed with the help of his assistant Edward Robert Hughes.

Hunt paintings were notable for their great attention to detail, vivid colour and 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 PreRaphaelite Brotherhood Hunt remained most true to their ideals throughout his career. He was always keen to maximise the popular appeal and public visibility of his works. [4]

William published an autobiography in 1905.[5] Many of his late writings are attempts to control the interpretation of his work. That year, he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII. At the end of his life he lived in Sonning-on-Thames.

My favorite work made by Hunt is The Awakening Conscience. And I want to speak about it.

Initially the painting would appear to be one of a momentary disagreement between husband and wife, or brother and sister, but the title and a host of symbols within the painting make it clear that this is a mistress and her lover. The woman's clasped hands provide a focal point and the position of her left hand emphasizes the absence of a wedding ring. Around the room are dotted reminders of her «kept» status and her wasted life: the cat beneath the table toying with a bird; the clock concealed under glass; a tapestry which hangs unfinished on the piano; the threads which lie unraveled on the floor; the print of Frank Stone's Cross Purposes on the wall; Edward Lear's musical arrangement of Tennyson's poem «Tears, Idle Tears» which lies discarded on the floor, and the music on the piano, Thomas Moore's "Oft in the Stilly Night", the words of which speak of missed opportunities and sad memories of a happier past. The discarded glove and top hat thrown on the table top suggest a hurried assignation. The room is too cluttered and gaudy to be in a Victorian family home; the bright colors, unstuffed carpet, and pristine, highlypolished furniture speak of a room recently furnished for a mistress. Art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn notes that although the interior is now viewed as «Victorian» it still exudes the «nouveau-riche' vulgarity» that would have made the setting distasteful to contemporary viewers. [6] The painting's frame is decorated with further symbols: bells (for warning), marigolds (for sorrow), and a star above the girl's head (a sign of spiritual revelation). It also bears a verse from the Book of Proverbs (25:20): «As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart» [6]

In some ways this painting is a companion to Hunt's Christian painting The Light of the World, a picture of Christ holding a lantern as he knocks on an overgrown handleless door which Hunt said represented «the obstinately shut mind».[7] he young woman here could be responding to that image, her conscience pricked by something outside of herself. Hunt intended this image to be The Light of the World's «material counterpart in a picture representing in actual life the manner in which the appeal of the spirit of heavenly love calls a soul to abandon a lower life.» [8] In Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Hunt wrote that Peggotty's search for Emily in David Copperfield had given him the idea for the composition and he began to visit «different haunts of fallen girls» looking for a suitable setting. He did not plan to recreate any particular scene from David Copperfield; he initially wanted to capture something more general: «the loving seeker of the fallen girl coming upon the object of his search», [8] but he reconsidered, deciding that such a meeting would engender different emotions in the girl than the repentance he wanted to show. He eventually settled on the idea that the girl's companion could be singing a song that suddenly reminded her of her former life and thereby act as the unknowing catalyst for her epiphany. [9]

The model for the girl was Annie Miller, who sat for many of the PreRaphaelites and to whom Hunt was engaged until 1859. The male figure may be based on Thomas Seddon or Augustus Egg, both painter friends of Hunt. The look on the girl's face in the modern painting is not the look of pain and horror that viewers saw when the painting was first exhibited, and which shocked and repulsed many of the contemporary critics. The painting was commissioned by Thomas Fairbairn, a Manchester industrialist and patron of the Pre-Raphaelites who later succeeded his father as 2nd Baronet, after Egg discussed Hunt's ideas and possibly showed him some of the initial sketches. [10] Fairbairn paid Hunt 350 guineas. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1854, along with The Light of the World. Fairbairn found himself unable to bear looking on the woman's expression day-to-day, so persuaded Hunt to soften it. Hunt started work but fell ill and allowed the painting to be returned to Fairbairn for display at the Birmingham Society of Artists exhibition in 1856 before he was completely happy with the result. Later he was able to work on it again and confided to Edward Lear that he thought he had «materially bettered it». [11] As noted in the spandrels, Hunt retouched the painting in 1864 and again in 1886 when he repaired some work that had been carried out by a restorer in the interim. [12]

The Victorian art theorist John Ruskin praised The Awakening Conscience as an example of a new direction in British art in which the narrative was created from the artist's imagination rather than chronicling an event. Ruskin's reading of the painting was also to a moral end. In an 1854 letter to The Times defending the work, he claimed that there is «not a single object in all that room...but it becomes tragically if read rightly». [13] He was struck by both the stark realism of the room -- Hunt had hired a room in a «maison de covenance» (where lovers would take their mistresses) in order to capture the feeling -- and the symbolic overtones and compared the revelation of the subjects' characters through the interiors favorably with that of William Hogarth's Marriage а-la-mode. [14] The «common, modern, vulgar» interior is overwhelmed by lustrous, unworn objects that will never be part of a home. To Ruskin, the exquisite detail of the painting only called attention to the inevitable ruin of the couple: «The very hem of the poor girl's dress, at which the painter has laboured so closely, thread by thread, has story in it, if we think how soon its pure whiteness may be soiled with dust and rain, her outcast feet failing in the street». [15] The idea of a visual morality tale, based on a single moment, influenced Augustus Egg's 1858 series of three paintings, Past and Present.

The painting was inherited by Fairbairn's son, Sir Arthur Henderson Fairbairn, 3rd Baronet. It was sold anonymously at Christie's in January 1946 and had been bought by Colin Anderson by 1947. It was donated to the Tate Gallery by Sir Colin and Lady Anderson in 1976. [15]

english painter william hunt

References

1. Amor, Anne Clark (1989). William Holman Hunt: the True Pre-Raphaelite. London: Constable. p. 15. ISBN 0094687706.

2. Hunt, W.H., Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; London: Macmillan; 1905, vol. 1 p 349

3. Victorian Web, http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/whh/plates/house.html

4. Judith Bronkhurst, `Hunt, William Holman (1827-1910)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004

5. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

6. British watercolours in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 26 August 2014.

7. BBC, BBC Drama Production presents Desperate Romantics for BBC Two

8. Barringer, Tim (1999). Reading the Pre-Raphaelites. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300077874.

9. Gissing, A.C. (1935). William Holman Hunt. London: Duckworth.

10. Hunt, William Holman (1905). Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. London: Macmillan.

11. Prettejohn, Elizabeth (2000). The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites. London: Tate Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-1-85437-726-5.

12. Prettejohn, Elizabeth (2005). Beauty & Art, 1750-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-280160-0.

13. Ruskin, John (2000) [1856]. Modern Painters: Volume 3. Of Many Things. BookSurge Publishing.

14. Serena, Cant (2006). Stephen Farthing, ed. 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die. London: Quintet Publishing Ltd. ISBN 1844035638.

15. «The Awakening Conscience» Tate Online. Retrieved 12 November 2008.

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