1827-1910 British William Holman Hunt Galleries Hunt's intended middle name was "Hobman", which he disliked intensely. He chose to call himself Holman when he discovered that his middle name had been misspelled this way after a clerical error at his baptism at the church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Ewell.[1] Though his surname is "Hunt", his fame in later life led to the inclusion of his middle name as part of his surname, in the hyphenated form "Holman-Hunt", by which his children were known. After eventually entering the Royal Academy art schools, having initially been rejected, Hunt rebelled against the influence of its founder Sir Joshua Reynolds. He formed the Pre-Raphaelite movement in 1848, after meeting the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Along with John Everett Millais they sought to revitalise art by emphasising the detailed observation of the natural world in a spirit of quasi-religious devotion to truth. This religious approach was influenced by the spiritual qualities of medieval art, in opposition to the alleged rationalism of the Renaissance embodied by Raphael. He had many pupils including Robert Braithwaite Martineau (best known for his work "Last Days in the Old Home") who was a moderately successful painter although he died young. The Hireling Shepherd, 1851Hunt's works were not initially successful, and were widely attacked in the art press for their alleged clumsiness and ugliness. He achieved some early note for his intensely naturalistic scenes of modern rural and urban life, such as The Hireling Shepherd and The Awakening Conscience. However, it was with his religious paintings that he became famous, initially The Light of the World (now in the chapel at Keble College, Oxford, with a later copy in St Paul's Cathedral), having toured the world. After travelling to the Holy Land in search of accurate topographical and ethnographical material for further religious works, Hunt painted The Scapegoat, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple and The Shadow of Death, along with many landscapes of the region. Hunt also painted many works based on poems, such as Isabella and The Lady of Shalott. All these paintings were notable for their great attention to detail, their hard vivid colour and their elaborate symbolism. These features were influenced by the writings of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, according to whom the world itself should be read as a system of visual signs. For Hunt it was the duty of the artist to reveal the correspondence between sign and fact. Out of all the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Hunt remained most true to their ideals throughout his career. He eventually had to give up painting because failing eyesight meant that he could not get the level of quality that he wanted. His last major work, The Lady of Shalott, was completed with the help of an assistant (Edward Robert Hughes). Hunt married twice. After a failed engagement to his model Annie Miller, he married Fanny Waugh, who later modelled for the figure of Isabella. When she died in childbirth in Italy he sculpted her tomb up at Fiesole, having it brought down to the English Cemetery, beside the tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. His second wife, Edith, was Fanny's sister. At this time it was illegal in Britain to marry one's deceased wife's sister, so Hunt was forced to travel abroad to marry her. This led to a serious breach with other family members, notably his former Pre-Raphaelite colleague Thomas Woolner, who had married Fanny and Edith's third sister Alice. Hunt's autobiography Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905) was written to correct other literature about the origins of the Brotherhood, which in his view did not adequately recognise his own contribution. Many of his late writings are attempts to control the interpretation of his work. In 1905, he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII. At the end of his life he lived in Sonning-on-Thames.  Related Paintings of William Holman Hunt :. | F.G.Stephens | The Awakening Conscience | Being English coasts | The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple | The Scapegoat |
Related Artists:
Paul Bril
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1554-1626 Paul (1554-1626) and Mattheus (1550-1583) Brill (or Bril) were brothers, both born in Antwerp, who were landscape painters who worked in Rome after earning papal favor. They are also described as painters of capricci (whims or fancies) or vedute ideate or veduta di fantasia, with typical rustic hills with a few ruins. Mattheus began work on several frescoes in Rome from 1570 onwards, and his work includes the Vatican Seasons. Mattheus died young, and his brother continued his work around 1574. Paul painted frescoes such as the landscapes in the Casino Rospigliosi (Rome), and The Roman Forum, which showed this site for what it had become: a slum for squatters and pasture for livestock (so much so that the place was nicknamed Campo Vaccino, or The Cowfield). His masterpiece may be a fresco in the Clementine Hall of the Vatican. Paul also did engravings and small cabinet paintings on copper, some of which are signed with a pair of spectacles (a pun on the French word brilles, spectacles). Some of these were collaborations with Johann Rottenhammer, who according to a dealer letter of 1617 painted the figures in Venice and then sent the plates to Rome for Bril to complete the landscape. He collaborated with his friend Adam Elsheimer, who he both influenced and was influenced by, on one painting (now Chatsworth House)
Erskine Nicol
British Genre Painter , (1825-1904) was an Irish/Scottish painter. A student of William Allan, Nicol taught in Dublin, Ireland, from 1845-50, at the height of the Irish famine, and considered himself as much Irish as he was Scottish. Much of his work portrays the injustices inflicted upon the Irish population during the 19th century. He was made an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1855 and an Academician in 1859. Nicol exhibited at the Royal Academy and was made an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1866
Jean Hey
Flemish Northern Renaissance Painter, active 1480-1500 Until the late 20th century, the name of the painter of the Moulins Triptych was unknown, although art historians identified a number of other works that were evidently by the same hand. The first monograph on the Master of Moulins, written in 1961 by Madeleine Huillet d'Istria, argued that this artist did not actually exist, and that more than 12 different artists were responsible for the corpus of works traditionally ascribed to him. The Master's identity was established after an inscription was found on the reverse of a damaged painting, Christ with Crown of Thorns (1494) in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, identifying the artist as Jean Hey, teutonicus and pictor egregius ("the famous painter"), and identifying the patron as Jean Cueillette, who was secretary to the King and an associate of the Bourbon family.Stylistic similarities link this painting to the works attributed to the Master of Moulins. The Master of Moulins appears to have been the court painter for the Bourbons, and from a surviving account for 1502-03, it is clear that the court painter's name was Jean; other candidates once considered plausible, such as Jean Perreal and Jean Prevost, have proven untenable in the light of subsequent research. The term "Teutonicus", or "German" included Flemings at this date.