William Holman Hunt
When William Holman Hunt
died in 1910, it brought to an end a painting career that had begun more than 60 years before – a career which had brought him renown for
his historical scenes and tableaux from the Bible and the Holy Lands.
Hunt travelled to the Middle East to get the detail just right for his best-known, and most critically appraised work, ‘The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple’. Ironically, the cast of Jewish faces you see staring out at you belong not to natives of Palestine, but to the artist’s East End neighbours – because Hunt could not find any Middle Eastern Jews to sit for him.
A long way up
Hunt may have died a pillar of the artistic establishment, but 60 years before his demise, he had been the enfant terrible of the English art scene. Along with John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he had formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and challenged the very idea of what cons-tituted great painting.
But, unlike Millais and Rossetti, Hunt wasn’t a child of rich parents, and it had been
a long, painful slog for him to even become an artist.
Hunt was born in 1827 into a poor family in Cheapside. From his boyhood he was desperate to become a painter. His father, a warehouseman, was having none of it, and the young William was sent to work as a clerk in the City at the age of 12.
Hunt still practised painting in his spare hours, and in 1844, at the third attempt, he was accepted as a probationer at the Royal Academy School.
Hunt met Millais and Rossetti at the school and introduced the pair to the
writings of John Ruskin, the renowned art critic who was railing against the lush, painterly canvases of the likes of Reynolds, Turner and Constable. Ruskin was urging artists to return to the purity, simplicity and accuracy of medieval painting as it was before the painter Raphael.
The group dubbed themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and set about transforming Ruskin’s theories into paintings.
For Hunt, the painstaking rules they had set themselves meant that his works often took years to complete, as he painted in every blade of grass, every leaf on a tree. Works such as ‘The Awakening Conscience’ and ‘The Light of the World’ took between five and 10 years to complete.
Fell for model
Hunt followed many artists into taking a studio in the East End. He may have been successful, but his painfully slow pace of working meant he
wasn’t yet rich, and space and models for his painstaking portraits were both much cheaper east of the City.
Like his Pre-Raphaelite brothers, Hunt soon succumbed to a weakness for
his beautiful models. But
being a religious and high-minded man, Hunt decided to reform and marry East End girl Annie Miller. Both plans ended in failure.
Success at last
By 1854, Hunt’s financial worries had abated a little, and he decided to take a trip to the Middle East.
His plan was to get as close to the source of the Scriptures as he could, and make his religious work as accurate and detailed as possible.
Hunt certainly gleaned a huge amount of detail of
buildings, scenery and vegetation, and he excitedly began
his masterwork. But try as he might, he could find no local people who were prepared to sit for him.
Disconsolate, he returned to his East End studio, where ‘Saviour’ sat unfinished for six more years. In 1860, Hunt realised the answer had been staring him in the face. The Jewish emigrants of the East End had the profiles and features he needed.
They sat for Hunt and, months later, art dealer
Ernest Gambert bought the finished masterpiece for the unheard-of amount of £5,500.