The Times Thursday September 8 1910

With much regret we learn that Mr William Holman Hunt died at his house at Melbury-road, Kensington, yesterday morning at the age of 83. His wife, his daughter, and his daughter-in-law were present at the end. Mr Holman Hunt’s death was sudden. Only ten days ago he went to Sonning, in Berkshire, and it was thought then that his health was good. Soon afterwards, however, he had a slight attack of bronchitis, from which he seemed to be making a rapid recovery. Unfortunately before he got rid of the bronchitis the asthma from which he suffered at times returned, and the difficulty of breathing caused too much of a strain on his heart. On Monday his strength began to fail, and on Tuesday he was brought back to London scarcely conscious.

MEMOIR

William Holman Hunt, O M, one o the most striking and most original painters of his time and one of the founders of the famous Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was born in Wood-street, Cheapside, on April 2, 1827, and was baptized in the church of St Giles, Cripplegate, where Milton is buried. He was the son of William Hunt, manager of a Wood-street warehouse, and came of a family of which one member is known to have served in the army of the Parliament and, after exile on the Continent to have returned to this country with William 111. Holman Hunt twice wrote a record of his life as an artist – the first time in three papers, published in the year 1886 in the Contemporary Review, and afterwards, in 1905, in two thick volumes, which though they contain a good deal of personal controversy which had better been omitted, contain also the fullest and most authentic account both of his own work and of the early struggles through which the young Brotherhood had to pass before it achieved recognition and fame. From these volumes we derive a deep impression of the strength of his will and the firmness with which, in spite of many great difficulties, he persevered to the end in the path which he had marked out for himself from the first. In this he was unlike Millais, who, as we know, changed his style in the middle of his career and deliberately chose to follow the public taste than to form it.

The two artists, whose early alliance and lifelong friendship form one of the most interesting stories in the annals of British art, were alike in this – that they were both devoted to art from their earliest childhood. But, while the boy Millais worked with the full consent of his parents, who were determined from the beginning that everything should be done to foster his precocious talent, young Hunt met with opposition from his father, a prudent man of business, who had a horror of “loafing” and “idleness,” and who believed, in common with most men of business of his time, that artists were commonly of a reckless, frivolous character and led a useless, unstable life. So the boy was taken from school at 12 years old and placed as a sort of probationary clerk with an auctioneer and estate agent in the City. His master, however, happened himself to have a taste for art, and actually encouraged young Hunt in drawing when he should have been casting accounts. Gradually the lad got leave from his father, not only to spend his leisure time drawing, but to spend his little salary upon taking lessons from a City portrait-painter, a pupil of a pupil of Reynolds, whose faults, as well as virtues, he imitated Meantime the lad had moved to Another office, becoming clerk in a Manchester warehouse in Cateaton-street, managed by an agent of Richard Cobden; but here he only stayed until he was 16, when his father was finally persuaded to allow him to try an artistic life at his own risk. He just managed to pay his expenses by painting portraits three days a week, and on other days he drew in the British Museum. The next step was to try for admission as a probationer in the Royal Academy schools; and while Hunt was waiting for this honour he attended the distribution of medals in the presence of all the students, and to the delight of the audience the name of John Everret Millais was proclaimed as the winner of the first prize. That was the first occasion of his seeing the lad, already famous among his contemporaries for the purity of his draughtsmanship, with whom he was a few years later to enter into so close an alliance.

After a little while Hunt obtained admission, and was not slow in becoming friends with Millais and a little later with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was also a student at the time. Presently Millais asked him home to the house in Gower-street where he was living with his parents, and there, to Hunt’s astonishment, he found several completed pictures and others, quite large, in various stages of preparation. Even then the young Millais was at work on a picture “as big as Raphael’s cartoons,” and was set upon sending it to Westminster Hall for the competition among artists for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament. Little by little the two lads became intimate, and presently each began to reveal to the other his discontent with the teaching of the Academy. They read with enthusiasm the wonderful new book “Modern Painters” by a writer calling himself an Oxford Graduate; and both agreed with the writer that the only chance for art in England was to take up the new message, to get away from the old conventions and old absurdities, and start upon a new method with the aim of realizing new ideals.

FOUNDATION OF THE “PRB.”

A little while later we find them daring to declare that Raphael’s Cartoons, with all their nobility, were full of faults, and condemning “The Transfiguration” for its “grandiose disregard for pose, the pompous posturing of the Apostles, and the unspiritual attitudinizing of the Saviour.” “In our final estimation,” Hunt wrote many years afterwards, “this picture was a significant step in the decadence of Italian Art. When we had advanced this opinion to other students, they, as the reductio ad absurdem, had said ‘you are Pre-Raphaelite.’ Referring to this as we worked side by side, Millais and I laughingly agreed that the designation must be accepted.” Out of this small incident arose the name that was to become so celebrated, though, as Hunt explains at great length in his autobiographical volumes, its adoption must not be taken to mean that Hunt and Millais, or even Rossetti, were in the least inclined to copy the men who had worked in Florence before Raphael, or consciously adopt their technique. “Pre-Raphaelitism,” he says “is not Pre-Raphaelitism,” that is to say, the principle upon which the young Englishmen were determined to work was not to identify themselves with any school or any tradition of the past, but only to follow Raphael’s predecessors in this, that they were to take their inspiration from Nature itself. As for the name, they were so pleased with it that, partly by way of a mystification, they adopted the three letters “PRB.” To be added to their signatures; but it was not until a year or two later that the Brotherhood, as a Brotherhood, was formally founded.

Without going at any length into the unfortunate controversies to which we have referred, we may say that the idea of the new art and the determination to devote their lives to it came from Hunt and Millais; that Rossetti a little older than themselves and at that time more devoted to literature than painting, of which as yet he knew very little, presently joined them, and undoubtedly supplied an element of Southern inspiration; and that the four other members who were presently admitted – Deverell, Woolner, F G Stephens, and W M Rossetti – were of minor importance. The last two were almost exclusively writers, Deverell was unhappily short-lived, and Woolner discouraged by temporary failure, left the country for the gold mines of Australia, where he spent a few unsuccessful years, returning to make a name as a sculptor. With regard to the founding of the PRB, Hunt dwells at great length in his book on two personal points, and the pages in which he does so cannot be said to make an agreeable impression. It is quite true that the friends and kinsfolk of Rossetti, in multitudinous books and papers, have put in untenable claims on behalf of the poet – painter, and it is also quite true that similar claims have been made on behalf of that crusty old artist – a man of undoubted genius, as Hunt readily admits – Ford Madox Brown; but it would have been enough to dispose of these claims in two or three genial pages, instead of devoting a great deal of space to a rather ill – tempered refutation. It is enough to say that Brown, who was seven or eight years older than either Hunt or Millais, was never a member of the Brotherhood, and that Rossetti, after a short time in Brown’s studio, was really taught the technique of painting by Holman Hunt. The close association between him and Millais was short – lived; their ideals and methods, as well as their characters, were quite different; and in his later years Rossetti went his own solitary way, though, on the rare occasions when they met he preserved as friendly relations with the two as a genius so isolated could be expected to preserve with any body.

HUNT’S FIRST PICTURES

We return to Hunt’s own career. In 1848 his “roughly prepared painting room” was at No 7 Gower-street, and Millais was living at No 867 in the same street. In his papers in the Contemporary Hunt describes as a very memorable event the finding in Millais’s house of a book of engravings of the Campo Santo at Pisa. He writes:

Millais, Rossetti, and myself were all looking for some sure ground, some starting point for our art which would be secure if it were ever so humble. As we searched through this book of engravings we found in them, or thought we found, that freedom from corruption, pride, and disease for which we sought. Here there was at least no trace of decline, no conventionality, no arrogance. Whatever the imperfection, the whole spirit of the art was simple and sincere – was as Ruskin afterwards said, eternally and unalterably true.

The first common pr that they determined upon was to paint a series of designs from the “Isabella” of Keats, a poet for whom one and all felt an enthusiastic admiration. Millais at once began and soon finished his marvellous picture of “Lorenzo and Isabella,” a work of which it has often been said that that it is probably an astonishing performance for a young man of twenty as exists in the world. After undergoing criticism and admiration all over England for over 30 years it finally found a home in the Corporation Gallery at Liverpool. Neither Hunt nor Rossetti proceeded for the moment as planned. The poem, as we shall see, supplied Hunt in later years with the material for one of the finest of his works. Rossetti went to the New Testament for his first important picture, and painted “The Education of Mary Virgin,” which he preferred to exhibit in a small private gallery in Great Portland-street; but the Academy contained Millais’s “Lorenzo” and Hunt’s “Rienzi.”

What strikes a modern investigator as extremely curious is that these pictures by a couple of unknown lads, instead of being simply admired or ignored, as would be the case with novelties at exhibition today, were instantly regarded as matter for fierce attack. The Academicians and their old-fashioned admirers seem to have been suddenly impressed with the idea that these pictures were a formidable assault upon their traditions and that it was worthwhile to use the heaviest artillery repelling it. The Times lead off with two columns of comment very far from favourable, and the public so far agreed that did not buy the “Rienzi.” After the exhibition closed it was bought through the influence of a man who then and later proved himself a true friend to the aspiring artist, Augustus Egg RA; and the purchaser was that Mr Gibbons a Birmingham banker, whose fine collection of English pictures is remembered by the present generation through the exhibition at Burlington House and through a great sale which took place at Christie’s a few years ago. To Hunt at this time, and long afterwards, ways and means were a question of tremendous urgency; and endowed as he was with more than the proverbial sensitiveness of an artist, regarded as the unfriendliness of the public and of many powerful spokesmen in the Press. This was natural enough at the time, but it is strange to find that, writing in the fulness of years and success, he dud not realize that revolutions whether in art or in any other department of life, are not carried out without a good deal of hard hitting on both sides.

The hard hitting of 1849, however, was nothing to that which broke out next year when Hunt exhibited his “Christian Missionary,” and Millais as a pendant the famous “Carpenter’s Shop” or “Christ in the House of His Parents.” What had been a breeze the year before became a storm at the present time, but it is strange to find the worst and most violent of all the attacks coming from the pen of no lesser person than Charles Dickens, who, in Household Words denounced the young painters in language that would have been severe if it had been applied to the worst criminals. But they struggled on; and in 1851 came “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” from Hunt, and “Marianna” and “The Return of the Dove to the Ark” by Millais. The Press critics repeated the same language of denunciation; but this time a champion was forthcoming in the person of Buskin, whose two letters The Times came, as Hunt says “like thunder out of a clear sky.” He admitted that there were faulty details, but with an eloquence which proved convincing to many, he pointed out the “perfect truth, power, and finish” of much of Hunt’s picture, and much in both of Millais’s; he went on to “assert generally and fearlessly” that as studies both of drapery and minor detail there has been nothing in art so complete as these pictures since the days of Albert Durer.” It was evident that the tide of opinion would presently turn; and it was remarked that after the appearance of Ruskin’s letters the Press, where it did not go over to the new school, became merely critical not denunciatory. But still Hunt’s pictures sold with difficulty and at low prices; and at this moment, if it had not been for Millais, backed up by the personal pleading of his parents, forced a loan on Hunt, the latter would have had to give up painting altogether. Encouraged in this way he fought on and painted “The Hireling Shepherd,” and in 1852 began “The Light of the World.” The principles of Pre-Raphaelitism cannot be better illustrated tan by the fact, recorded by himself, that Hunt painted the background of this picture out of doors from 9.00 p.m. to 5.00 am, about the time of the full moon for two to three months. He sat in an open shed made of hurdles, and painted by the light of a candle. With the exhibition of “The Hireling Shepherd” it may be said that success first smiled on him. It was hung on the line, and after a short time was sold for a good price.

“ THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD”

It was, however, with “The Light of the World” that Holman Hunt first really conquered public opinion. The original picture, comparatively small in size, was begun in the country and finished, after nearly three years’ work, in the year 1854 in the artist’s studio in Chelsea, where he continued to work on it at night, to the amazement of neighbours and passing omnibus drivers, as he describes in an entertaining passage in his book. While the work was in progress Hunt made one of the important friendships of his life, that of Mr Thomas Coombe, manager of the Oxford University Press, a High Churchman, a man of considerable means, and, with his wife, devoted to art as it was then being preached by Ruskin. First Millais, and then Hunt were admitted to the intimacy of these interesting people; and many of their pictures – now to be seen at the University Gallery at Oxford – passed into the possession of Mr Coombe, that fine old character whose patriarchal presence still remains in the memory of Oxford men to this day. It was for him that “The Light of the World” was painted, and to him, in spite of offers from several other people it went in the end, to be given after his death by Mrs Coombe to Keble College, where it still remains. We may here note that that many years afterwards Hunt painted a replica of the picture, which was bought by Mr Charles Booth, and, after being exhibited in England & the Colonies was presented by him to St Paul’s Cathedral.

From the beginning the picture excited a good deal of controversy, but rather theological than artistic, and some of the most interesting pages in Hunt’s book are those which contain his report of Carlyle’s friendly denunciation of it, when he paid a visit to his young neighbour to see the work. He did not denounce it on artistic grounds; far from it; indeed Mrs Carlyle wrote that her husband had said “it is a really grand picture!” The greatest picture that he has seen painted by any modern man. But he thought it unhistorical, like almost all other paintings of Christ; for Carlyle, though in his rapid survey of the history of sacred art he does not mention Rembrandt, would evidently have thought that “The Pilgrims of Emmaus” in the Louvre was one of the New Testament pictures that could be accepted as satisfying. Artistically “The Light of the World” had a great success, and the exhibition of it, although it did not bring every body to the feet of the painter, at least silenced the old cavilling and the old hostility. It did not, in the first instance bring much him money, for he sold it to Mr Coombe for £400; but it settled his position in the world of art, and, what he valued even more, enabled him to carry out his long cherished scheme of visiting the Holy Land, where he intended to paint actually on the spot, as a Pre-Raphaelite should, scenes from the sacred story.

FRUITS OF VISIT TO PALESTINE

The account of his two visits to Palestine fills many chapters in the autobiography, but on the details of his life there it is not necessary to dwell. Let it suffice to say that his headquarters were at Jerusalem, but that for weeks he lived not far from the Dead Sea, painting the dreary landscape for his picture of “The Scapegoat”; that he was often in danger from prowling Arabs; and that, when he came back from Jerusalem he found for a time considerable difficulty in getting Jews to sit to him for his picture of “The Finding of Jesus in the Temple.” However, as all the world knows, he triumphed in the end; and, though “The Scapegoat” was found too severe a trial for the faith of many, there was no question at all about the overwhelming success of the other picture. It was about that time that the French dealer Gambert had settled in London, and had begun to revolutionize the picture trade by the high prices that he paid for anything which he believed would make a real popular success. He may not have invented the system of country exhibitions of single pictures, but he certainly developed it to a degree until then unknown. It mattered not whether the picture was sacred or profane; whether it appealed to serious or to sporting instincts; all that mattered was that it should be a fine thing of its kind. He had bought the copyright of “The Light of the World” and made large profits from his venture, and now he came forward to and proposed to buy “The Finding of Jesus.” For a time Hunt’s price staggered him. But the artist knew what years of labour, and what pecuniary outlay the picture had cost; he would not budge an inch, and finally Gambart consented to give him the sum asked - £5,500. It was a high figure, but those who can remember the sensation that the picture caused in its perambulations through the country, and the enormous sale of the steel engravings, will have no difficulty in believing that the dealer made no bad bargain. To Hunt the important thing was that his future was henceforth secure, and that the cloud of difficulty which had oppressed his youth had now rolled away.

Two other important pictures from the New Testament remained to be painted, besides a number of Eastern vies and studies of less importance, whether oil pictures or those works in water-colour which the artist used to send from time to time to the “Old” Society. These were “The Shadow of Death,” finished in 1873, and “The Holy Innocents.” The former was bought for a very large sum by Messrs. Agnew, and after being shown all over the country, and admirably engraved, was finally presented by Sir William Agnew to Manchester Art Gallery. “The Holy Innocents,” owing to an accident with the canvas, cost Hunt enormous labour, and when it was finished its success with the public was not uniformly great. But Ruskin, in his Oxford lectures, spoke of it with unmeasured enthusiasm.

A CRITICISM OF HUNT’S ART

Besides these, we have to name among the important pictures of Holman Hunt’s middle and later periods, the admirable “Isabella and the Pot of Basil” (painted at Florence in 1866), and the last of all his exhibited works “The Lady of Shalott.” No better example could be found of Holman Hunt’s holding to an idea once entertained than the history of this last picture. The original design was made as an illustration to the famous Illustrated Tennyson published by Moxon in the year 1857; and, though Hunt himself records that Tennyson only half liked the drawing, and objected to the suggestion of the whirling movement as a thing not conveyed by the verse, the artist never changed, and began to paint in 1889 a subject that he had drawn more than thirty years before. It was a pity that he could not complete it at once; for, before it was finished, his sight had failed so much that he had to employ an assistant to carry out some portions under his direction. None the less it has merits which distinguish it among the artists’ works, for in grace of form and in beauty of feature it may be said to stand alone among them. As Ruskin pointed out in his criticism of “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Hunt’s ideas of female beauty were seldom such as to commend themselves to mankind. Indeed, whether he painted woman or man or child, his over- conscientiousness in the exact rendering of surfaces as he saw them robbed the faces of nearly all their charm. His well – known portrait of Professor Owen is more like the map of a face than the picture of anything alive; and the babies in that highly imaginative work, “The Holy Innocents,” are so solidly modelled that they may be taken to excuse some at least of the attacks which have been levelled against Hunt’s art.

Hunt has long been recognized abroad as one of the leading artists of his time, and many years ago he was invited to paint his own portrait for the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. But it would be a mistake to suppose that foreign artists are in general sympathy with him; ad as a matter of fact at the present day very few educated Frenchmen can be found to admire his paintings. To them the great argument against English Pre-Raphaelitism in general, and Hunt’s art in particular, is that the conception of a whole is lost through the elaboration of the parts, and that Hunt has devoted to an amazing perfection of detail the care which he ought primarily have given to atmosphere and “values.” We need not here reopen a controversy which, whether in words or in paint, has been going on for fifty years and which the opinion of both painters and laymen all over the world has practically decided against Holman Hunt. He and his followers worked with admirable determination and consistency in furthering an ideal in which they believed; but their direct effect on modern painting has been curiously slight. The passion which was aroused in their favour, after a period of abuse and opposition, was ephemeral; and the feeling which nine trained observers out of ten experience to-day in front of a picture by Holman Hunt is admiration rather than pleasure. None the less he will remain an impressive figure in the history of English Art; his career as a painter has in it a rare element of greatness; and it was with universal approval that the world learnt in 1905, that he had been chosen by King Edward as a member of the Order of Merit in succession to Watts.

A word should be said of two questions which at various times Holman Hunt came forward to take an active part in controversy. One was the reform of the Royal Academy, as to which some 20 years ago we published several letters from him, advocating great changes in the method of election of members and in the tenure of the position. Hunt himself had once or twice, as a young man, offered himself for selection, but opinion within the body was not ripe, and afterwards, when he would, of course, have been elected by acclamation, he stood a little too much on his dignity and refused to come forward. The other question was that of the Deceased Wife’s Sister, in regard to which he several times wrote to us in support of the removal of disabilities, which was finally granted in 1907. Mr Hunt had a personal interest in this matter for, after his first wife Miss Fanny Waugh had died in Florence in 1866, he married her sister, to whom, in language of affectionate homage, he dedicated his Pre-Raphaelitism in 1905.