Rossetti was copying tobacco boxes in Madox Brown’s studio, one of his classmates at the Royal Academy was making desperate, superhuman efforts to create a place for himself as an independent artist and thus escape from a future in business. His name was William Holman Hunt, and he was twenty-one years of age. His father, a businessman with a small enterprise in the City, had tried everything to dissuade him from his artistic career. But never has fatherly prudence been so obstinately thwarted by destiny. At twelve years old the boy spent his time drawing instead of learning, so he was taken out of school and given a job as a clerk in an auctioneer’s office. One day Hunt’s new employer caught him hiding something in his desk, and insisted on knowing what it was.
Walter Crane, The Lady of Shalott, 1862.
Oil on canvas, 24.1 × 29.2 cm.
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Foundation, New Haven, CT.
He discovered that it was a drawing, and was filled with joy. “It’s good,” he said. “On our first free day, we will shut ourselves in here and spend the day painting.” This lasted for a year and a half, after which the young man was placed in a warehouse run by one of Richard Cobden’s agents. There he met another assistant whose principal task was to draw ornaments for the company’s fabrics. Naturally, the young Hunt helped him with his task and dreamed more than ever of becoming an artist. Meanwhile, he spent his savings taking lessons from a portrait painter who was a student of Reynolds. One day, an old orange merchant came to his warehouse to offer her produce, and Hunt made such a lifelike portrait of her that word of it spread among all the neighbours and reached the ears of the elder Hunt. The son took advantage of these circumstances to declare that he would be a painter and nothing but, and the exhausted father gave in. For a long time, Holman Hunt struggled with poverty, engaging in various sorts of drudgery to try to escape it. He reproduced the paintings of the masters on behalf of other copyists and retouched portraits that no longer pleased their owners, either because they were not lifelike enough, or because they were too lifelike, or because the clothing in them had gone out of style. He failed the entrance examinations for the Royal Academy twice. After a thousand setbacks, threatened with returning to business or going to work in the countryside with his uncle, a farmer, he finally succeeded.
Fortunately, his career had a few good moments here and there. During his time at the Academy, Hunt met a young man two years younger than himself named John Everett Millais, practically a child, who surprised his masters with his marvellous talent. At fifteen, he had already won a medal for his studies of ancient art. Everything seemed to promise him a most brilliant career. The two young men often spoke about the future, about their own, but also about that of English art, which they found had aged poorly. They spoke of the heavy, dreary, blackish colours that they were taught to use in school, comparing them with the light, lively, musical hues used by the great masters of the past and found in nature, and asked themselves how one could substitute the former for the latter. Hunt was struck by something a passer-by had said to him while he was copying Wilkie’s Blind Fiddler at the National Gallery: “You will never achieve the freshness of Wilkie if you paint over brown, grey, or bitumen. If you first cover the canvas with neutral colours, certain ones for the shadows and others for the light, like they teach you to do at the Academy, these backgrounds will eventually come out from under your colours and blacken them. Wilkie painted on a white canvas, without a coloured ground, and finished his painting bit by bit like a fresco.”[6] This advice from the unknown man came at exactly the right time, not because it was excellent in itself, but because it pointed out a heroic remedy. Hunt and Millais both thought about it and, after examining the few Primitive paintings that they saw here and there in the galleries, they began wondering if their eternal freshness came from this straightforward working method, without under-painting and mixing tricks, that the masters before Raphael had imported from fresco painting, where it is unavoidable, into oil painting, where it was later abandoned. In these Primitive masters, where Madox Brown had mostly noticed gestures that were individually created and not learned by rote, poses taken not from a mannequin or the famous figures of masterpieces but from nature, the two young men saw a light, brilliant colour that they set out uncertainly to achieve.
Edmund Blair Leighton, The Accolade, 1901.
Oil on canvas, 180.9 × 108.5 cm.
Private Collection.
Walter Crane, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1865.
Oil on canvas, 46.3 × 56.5 cm.
Private Collection.
John Everett Millais, A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford, 1857.
Oil on canvas, 124 × 170 cm.
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight.
Sir Frank Dicksee, Chivalry, c. 1885.
Oil on canvas, 183 × 136 cm.
The FORBES Magazine Collection, New York.
Besides aesthetic discussions, Holman Hunt’s other great pleasure was reading. Poets, historians, philosophers and scholars, he devoured everything that came into his hands. Like Flandrin, he trained his mind and his eye at the same time, and after painting all day long, he read all through the night. One evening, one of his studio companions brought him a book by an Oxford graduate that had only recently appeared but was constantly being reprinted: The Modern Painters. Holman Hunt leafed through the book, first with curiosity, then with admiration, and finally with enthusiasm. This was not one of those volumes of vague, idle chatter that one is accustomed to categorising as aesthetics, a discussion about art by one of those literary renegades who write badly and do not draw at all. It was a swift plea, eloquent and passionate, in favour of naturalist landscapes and rejecting composed academic ones. It was a glittering study full of facts and examples where one sensed the experience of a practising artist behind each theory, a dissertation where one felt that every stroke of the pen had been preceded by a stroke of the brush. And it was also beautifully written, employing the richest, strongest and most concise language that could be imagined. Hunt was captivated. These pages were written by a stranger, but nonetheless seemed to have been created specifically for him, for they expressed so clearly the very things he felt vaguely in his soul. So he spent the night hunched over the book, reading. What then? This, for example: “And it ought to be a rule with every painter, never to let a picture leave his easel while it is yet capable of improvement, or of having more thought put into it. The general effect is often perfect and pleasing, and not to be improved upon, when the details and facts are altogether imperfect and unsatisfactory. It may be difficult, perhaps the most difficult task of art, to complete these details, and not to hurt the general effect; but, until the artist can do this, his art is imperfect and his picture unfinished. That only is a complete picture which has both the general wholeness and effect of nature, and the inexhaustible perfection of nature’s details. And it is only in the effort to unite these that a painter really improves. By aiming only at details, he becomes a mechanic; by aiming only at generals, he becomes a trickster; his fall in both cases is sure.”[7]
The author also said: “Now it is, indeed, impossible for the painter to follow all this; he cannot come up to the same degree and order of infinity, but he can give us a lesser kind of infinity. He has not one-thousandth part of the space to occupy which nature has; but he can, at least, leave no part of that space vacant and unprofitable. If nature carries out her minutiae over miles, he has no excuse for
See Redgrave, A
John Ruskin,
