William Holman Hunt exhibition at Manchester, UK
Among the three leading members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it's the one whose imagery is the most abrasive who is generally accorded the highest stature in the history of art.
John Everett Millais sets out to charm and Dante Gabriel Rossetti to seduce, but William Holman Hunt is more powerful than either because he doesn't care whether you like his pictures or not.
As eminent a Victorian in his way as Florence Nightingale or Thomas Carlyle, Hunt didn't know how to compromise and he didn't do decorative. To my mind, he was one of the most distinguished British painters who ever lived, and yet, paradoxically, I find most of his later paintings positively repellent. So what happened?
Born in London in 1827 and trained in the Royal Academy Schools, he came of age at the tail end of the Romantic movement and during a time when revolutionary fervour was sweeping through Europe.
Here in Britain, progressive young artists expressed dissent by flouting rules of composition, perspective and draughtsmanship that had been the backbone of academic teaching for centuries.
In his early pictures Hunt is single-minded in his attempt both to show an imperfect world exactly as it is, and to re-create historical or fictional events just as they might have happened.
When seated at his easel in front of a landscape, Hunt painted what he saw within his field of vision, selecting nothing, rejecting nothing - right down to the last wild flower, thistle and blade of grass.
For all the technical virtuosity on display in a picture such as The Hireling Shepherd, the eye tires of looking because Hunt didn't know (or didn't care) that in real life when we focus on an object in the foreground, the background and peripheral areas of the scene are blurred - and vice versa.
In contrast to the other Pre-Raphaelites, Hunt's fanatical realism never dimmed. What was harsh in the early pictures becomes hallucinogenic in the late ones, yet still he went on, indifferent to fashion, taste, decorum, and charm - qualities that seduced his colleague Millais but which are, after all, subtle poisons that turn good art to bad.
In his A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids of 1849-50, all the elements that make Hunt such an original artist are already in full play.
The figures look like real people because Hunt painted them not from professional models but from his own circle of friends and acquaintances. The deliberately awkward composition, the ungainly poses, and the flattened pictorial space capture the confusion and terror of the moment when the exhausted priest finds refuge from a howling mob.
Because he used small brushes to apply his clear colours on to a wet white ground, the picture possesses a startling luminosity that until now had only been achieved by British artists who painted in watercolour.
But, more than anything else, it is the clarity and precision of Hunt's draughtsmanship that makes us believe in the reality of every detail - from individually painted staves of wheat to the tiny figure of the priest seen through the interstices of a fishing net as he flees for his life in the distance.
All the themes that Hunt would return to over the next 40 years are already present, including heroic self-sacrifice, Christianity triumphant, love for his country, and delight in the English countryside.
Hunt's love for his country is inseparable from landscapes so ravishingly painted that they pierce the heart. I'm thinking of smaller pictures such as Our English Coasts (1852), a view of nondescript cliff-top in high summer with grazing sheep that miraculously captures every nuance of shifting lights and shadows.
Today it is hard for us to see how radical the picture once was, but in his uncompromising mission to capture exactly what the eye sees, Hunt challenges photography directly by depicting some sheep caught half in and half out of the edge of picture, just as the camera does.
Hunt's love of his country was not uncritical. The title Our English Coasts reminded viewers that their coasts were undefended at a time when the country was thought to be vulnerable to invasion by Napoleon III.
The Hireling Shepherd describes with amazing frankness an obviously willing young farm girl's seduction by a strapping shepherd - a rustic Adam and Eve about to sin in a voluptuously painted Eden. But, for all its sensuality, Hunt intended the picture as a rebuke to the bishops of England for their failure to educate their flock in the rudiments of Christian morality.
He returns to the theme in The Awakening Conscience which shows a fallen woman literally "seeing the light", not because some clergyman has instilled in her the love of virtue, but because she looks out at a garden in full bloom and realises that her dissolute way of life has trapped her in a gilded cage. As moralist and storyteller, Hunt was one of Hogarth's heirs.
After his own religious conversion, he travelled to the Holy Land in order to paint as accurately as possible the places and the landscape that Christ himself would have known. Once there, he discarded any lingering shreds of gentility or refinement.
The Scapegoat may well be the most horrifying image in British art. Whether or not you are aware that it illustrates the ancient Hebrew custom of symbolically loading the sins of the tribe on to a helpless goat and then leaving it to expire in the wilderness, simply as an undiluted portrayal of suffering that is both prolonged and without reprieve it can make us avert our eyes.
Until now, Hunt permitted his viewers to read most of his pictures symbolically or not, as they saw fit. But late pictures such as The Shadow of Death and Triumph of the Innocents are virtually sermons in paint. Hunt's painting technique is more brilliant than ever, but these pictures strike me as aids for Sunday school teachers, not works of great art.
I have waited most of my adult life for a show that would do justice to this unique - and uniquely flawed - artist. I wish I could say this one fulfilled my expectations...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
John Everett Millais sets out to charm and Dante Gabriel Rossetti to seduce, but William Holman Hunt is more powerful than either because he doesn't care whether you like his pictures or not.
As eminent a Victorian in his way as Florence Nightingale or Thomas Carlyle, Hunt didn't know how to compromise and he didn't do decorative. To my mind, he was one of the most distinguished British painters who ever lived, and yet, paradoxically, I find most of his later paintings positively repellent. So what happened?
Born in London in 1827 and trained in the Royal Academy Schools, he came of age at the tail end of the Romantic movement and during a time when revolutionary fervour was sweeping through Europe.
Here in Britain, progressive young artists expressed dissent by flouting rules of composition, perspective and draughtsmanship that had been the backbone of academic teaching for centuries.
In his early pictures Hunt is single-minded in his attempt both to show an imperfect world exactly as it is, and to re-create historical or fictional events just as they might have happened.
When seated at his easel in front of a landscape, Hunt painted what he saw within his field of vision, selecting nothing, rejecting nothing - right down to the last wild flower, thistle and blade of grass.
For all the technical virtuosity on display in a picture such as The Hireling Shepherd, the eye tires of looking because Hunt didn't know (or didn't care) that in real life when we focus on an object in the foreground, the background and peripheral areas of the scene are blurred - and vice versa.
In contrast to the other Pre-Raphaelites, Hunt's fanatical realism never dimmed. What was harsh in the early pictures becomes hallucinogenic in the late ones, yet still he went on, indifferent to fashion, taste, decorum, and charm - qualities that seduced his colleague Millais but which are, after all, subtle poisons that turn good art to bad.
In his A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids of 1849-50, all the elements that make Hunt such an original artist are already in full play.
The figures look like real people because Hunt painted them not from professional models but from his own circle of friends and acquaintances. The deliberately awkward composition, the ungainly poses, and the flattened pictorial space capture the confusion and terror of the moment when the exhausted priest finds refuge from a howling mob.
Because he used small brushes to apply his clear colours on to a wet white ground, the picture possesses a startling luminosity that until now had only been achieved by British artists who painted in watercolour.
But, more than anything else, it is the clarity and precision of Hunt's draughtsmanship that makes us believe in the reality of every detail - from individually painted staves of wheat to the tiny figure of the priest seen through the interstices of a fishing net as he flees for his life in the distance.
All the themes that Hunt would return to over the next 40 years are already present, including heroic self-sacrifice, Christianity triumphant, love for his country, and delight in the English countryside.
Hunt's love for his country is inseparable from landscapes so ravishingly painted that they pierce the heart. I'm thinking of smaller pictures such as Our English Coasts (1852), a view of nondescript cliff-top in high summer with grazing sheep that miraculously captures every nuance of shifting lights and shadows.
Today it is hard for us to see how radical the picture once was, but in his uncompromising mission to capture exactly what the eye sees, Hunt challenges photography directly by depicting some sheep caught half in and half out of the edge of picture, just as the camera does.
Hunt's love of his country was not uncritical. The title Our English Coasts reminded viewers that their coasts were undefended at a time when the country was thought to be vulnerable to invasion by Napoleon III.
The Hireling Shepherd describes with amazing frankness an obviously willing young farm girl's seduction by a strapping shepherd - a rustic Adam and Eve about to sin in a voluptuously painted Eden. But, for all its sensuality, Hunt intended the picture as a rebuke to the bishops of England for their failure to educate their flock in the rudiments of Christian morality.
He returns to the theme in The Awakening Conscience which shows a fallen woman literally "seeing the light", not because some clergyman has instilled in her the love of virtue, but because she looks out at a garden in full bloom and realises that her dissolute way of life has trapped her in a gilded cage. As moralist and storyteller, Hunt was one of Hogarth's heirs.
After his own religious conversion, he travelled to the Holy Land in order to paint as accurately as possible the places and the landscape that Christ himself would have known. Once there, he discarded any lingering shreds of gentility or refinement.
The Scapegoat may well be the most horrifying image in British art. Whether or not you are aware that it illustrates the ancient Hebrew custom of symbolically loading the sins of the tribe on to a helpless goat and then leaving it to expire in the wilderness, simply as an undiluted portrayal of suffering that is both prolonged and without reprieve it can make us avert our eyes.
Until now, Hunt permitted his viewers to read most of his pictures symbolically or not, as they saw fit. But late pictures such as The Shadow of Death and Triumph of the Innocents are virtually sermons in paint. Hunt's painting technique is more brilliant than ever, but these pictures strike me as aids for Sunday school teachers, not works of great art.
I have waited most of my adult life for a show that would do justice to this unique - and uniquely flawed - artist. I wish I could say this one fulfilled my expectations...