I must confess at the outset that although I will always revere the Pre-Raphaelites as a group for their art and love them for the primary role they played in played in my own artisitc education, Holman Hunt has always been a slightly problematic artist. There can be little doubt that his pictures can be difficult to like and for two main reasons I think. The first is that his colour can be very harsh, he seemed to have a liking for rather acidic greens and yellows and this accentuates the hardness of the essentially linear method of early PRB composition. The second reason is his rather overbearing moralistic attitude which at times spills over into his painting with often a deleterious effect. This is not the place for a long discussion of the role of morality in painting (I will talk about it in greater depth in future posts though, so you have been warned!) suffice it to say here that as a general rule I think an overt "message" of any kind which might better be written, ie moral, political or social, tends to count against the artisitc merit of a picture. I say "tends to" because it is not an iron law merely an observable phenomenen; if art should appeal primarily to the senses, as I believe it should, then it follows that any overt intellectual message is likely, by impressing itself on the mind of the spectator, to weaken the sensual response.
I am aware that this idea is a controversial one and raises a lot of questions but I shall pass over this topic till a later date and continue with the specific subject of Holman Hunt at the Tate exhibtion. Having made the comment that he can be a difficult artist to warm to I shall start with a couple of pictures which I think illustrate why this might be so. First up we have "The Awakening Conscience" of 1853, one of the most famous of the many Victorian "problem pictures".
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| William Holman Hunt: The Awakening Conscience |
For a modern audience (as indeed for contemporary ones, though for different reasons) it may not be clear what is going on here, we are not, (at least most of us are not) familiar with the practise of having a "kept woman" in a flashy St.John's Wood apartment the immorality of which was betrayed, as Ruskin pointed out in a letter to The Times, by the "fatal newness" of the furniture. The picture is littered with signs and symbols which, if read correctly, tell the story of the carefree young "swell" and the poor woman he has dragged down to a life of sin who realises, too late presumabably, that she is on the road to ruin. The whole situation is complete anathema to the modern view of sexual realtions of course, and indeed it may be argued that we are resistant to having our consciences awakened about any situation whatever. So the picture has a hard task to win modern sympathy to begin with and the microscopic depiction of a vulgar Victorian sitting room full of ugly furniture and uglier accessories isn't the best way to go about it however much we are compelled to admire Hunt's technical skill.
The other picture I would select as indicative of the difficulties a modern audience has with Hunt is "The Triumph of the Innocents". Of course any religious picture has a difficulty now as for the most part a modern audience is completely unfamiliar with the stories which Hunt would assume his audience knew by heart. This particularly "story" of course is an imaginative invention of Hunt's and he set himself the difficult task of giving body to the essentially incorporeal spirits of the young children massacred by King Herod. He has doubled his difficult by setting his picture in an eerie moonlight and the result I think is a wonderful picture, in many ways full of delightful detail, but difficult to swallow whole as it were. We can't help but think, "what is going on here?" and the time spent puzzling it out is time taken away from letting the aesthetic sensation wash over us. Like so much of Hunt's work it demands intellectual appreciation rather than aesthetic appreciation.
There is very little in Hunt's work where one gets the impression that he has been affected or inspired by the purely sensual nature of the medium of paint. One is reminded of Wilde's quip about Henry James that he wrote "as though it were a painful duty" but although Hunt never entirely forgets his mission to teach the public moral truths there are moments when other elements force (one is tempted to say against Hunt's will, but that is perhaps unfair) their way to the forefront of the spectators impression. It is perhaps revealing that many of his most appealing works are in those categories which by their nature are not so well suited to moral messages, ie landscape and portraiture. It is not in the Tate show but the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has recently acquired a lovely portrait of his wife known as "The Birthday". This, along with the wonderful "Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil (see below) is one of Hunt's attempts at a picture in the Aesthetic mode as popularized by Moore, Burne-Jones and others and is a glorious exercise in colour which only makes one wish Hunt could have done more in this vein, though in reality of course no artist of the period was further from accepting the aesthetic watchword of art for art's sake.
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| William Holman Hunt: The Birthday |
In landscape too, Hunt produced some truly memorable work, among which the one pictured below is in my opinion one of the great British landscapes of the century and remembering that this was the century of both Turner and Constable that is not a small claim.
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| William Holman Hunt: Strayed Sheep (Our English Coasts) |
The double title is typical of Hunt and hints again at a message beyond the obvious, in this case a political one hinting at the possible threat of French invasion. The point is though that it is entirely possible to look at this picture and be completely unaware of this and view nothing but some sheep standing in a gorgeous landscape. And how beautifully it is painted! Delacroix, on seeing this picture in Paris in 1855 recorded in his journal "I am really astounded by Hunt's sheep" and one can see why this great colourist was so impressed. This is a picture that really merits close and detailed observation, every stroke is a delight, the wool of the sheep is made up of tiny marks of pink and yellow and mauve and details such as the bright crimson of the sheep's ears as the sunlight passes through them are faithfully and beautifully recorded.
This picture started life as a replica for the background for Hunt's most famous sheep picture "The Hireling Shepherd" of 1851.
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| William Holman Hunt: The Hireling Shepherd |
To my mind this is one of the great masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It is a truly wonderful picture, both in the detail, which as one would expect of Hunt is painted with astonishing virtuosity, and in the whole, which is a beautiful arrangement of hue and value. For the latter point squint your eyes and see how cleverly Hunt makes one mass of the lower values running from left to right, through the shadow of the shepherd up through his dark clothes, into the hair of the girl and thence into the shadows of the trees and the landscape on the the right. Of course there is a moral to this picture, a mid Victorian audience couldn't have heard the words "shepherd" and "sheep" without being aware of the Christian allusions and here the shepherd's lack of concern for his flock is intended as an indictment of the clergy. Even without the fact that these sort of allusions mean nothing to a large part of the contemporary audence, the immediate impression made by this picture is of the lovely representation of a young couple set in a glorious English landscape. Everything is painted with such tender care and a reverence for the beauty of nature that the slightly critical moral message of the picture comes a definite second (if it comes at all) into the mind of the spectator.
I think it fair to say that the majority of Hunt's best pictures came in the early years of his career when he was working hard to establish himself and had the constant support (and perhaps the competition) of his Preraphaelite brothers, particularly Millais who was, and remained, a close friend. He always worked slowly of course, and unlike Millais never abandoned the meticulous and painstaking Preraphaelite technique. Many of his later works such as "The Shadow of Death" suffer from the defect I have talked about earlier where the need to stress a moral message has taken precedence over strictly pictorial concerns, the pose of Christ throws the necessary shadow on the wall but looks slightly ridiculous and the hint of the presents of the Magi in the trunk on the left is indicative, as has been pointed out by W Graham Robertson, of Hunt's curiously literal turn of mind.
The masterpiece of his later years, happily included in the Tate show, is "The Lady of Shalott" and it may not be coincidental that this great picture is based on an illustration made at the outset if his career in the early 1850's. It has to be said this is an odd picture, it is not immediately apparent that the circular construction on the floor is a loom but the colours are more subdued than is usual for Hunt and the whole picture is dominated by the magnificent figure of the Lady struggling to break free of her tapestry and her destiny. Of course we view her struggle as a heroic one and her destiny, however shadowy, as inherently unjust, but we can enjoy the picture without knowing the poem from which it comes. It is a wonderful aesthetic conception and that, to borrow a phrase from Keats, is all we know and all we need to know. Incidentally I can't resist mentioning in connection of this picture, as an instance of the strange blindness which sometimes afflicts the masters of one art towards another, the single recorded comment of Tennyson when seeing the original illustration which was only "I never said her hair was flying about all over the place like that!"
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| William Holman Hunt: The Lady of Shalott |
So in closing, although Hunt can be a difficult artist (and indeed personality) to really warm to, he was a considerable artist who always merits attention and critical study. As is often the case, his merits were also his faults. He had the one quality which all the great Victorians had, and which we tend to lack, in fact we tend even not to regard it as a quality, and that is that he took himself seriously. Often today the phrase "he didn't take himsalf too seriously" is used as the ultimate accolade, but the Victorians knew the great secret that life is a serious business and you can't really enjoy it unless you understand that. What is even more certain is that you can't produce art of any value unless you regard what you do as supremely important. Hunt did that and deserves respect and admiration as a result. On the minus side his view of life as a serious business could slide off into a morbid and puritanical morality which impressed itself with often negative results in his art. But he produced, over the course of a long life, a number of truly wonderful works in different genres, portrait, landscape and religious. In the last category, I haven't yet mentioned his picture "The Light of the World" one of the most famous religious picture of any age and a work which, focusing on the Christian message of love and redemption, is probably the most tender and generous of Hunt's religious pictures. Hunt's work needs a sympathetic curator to save him from his worst excesses but thus treated he can be shown as a considerable artist, a superb technician and dedicated artist who always produced pictures worth looking at and thinking about, and I have to say, as an epitaph, that would do for me.
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| William Holman Hunt: Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil |
