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 :. | The Plain of Rephaim from Mount Zion (mk46) | The Lady of Shalott | The Light of the World | On English Coasts. | Portrait of Fanny Holman Hunt |
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fredrika bremer
was a Swedish writer and a feminist activist. Fredrika Bremer was born in Åbo (Turku) in Finland but moved with her family to Stockholm when she was three years old. She grew up in Stockholm and in the manor Årsta outside Stockholm. Her father was described as somewhat of a house tyrant, and her mother was a socialite, and she and her sisters where brought up to marry in to the aristocracy; a trip on the continent 1821-1822 was the finishing touch of her upbringing before her debute. Bremer was not comfortable with this role, and was inflicted by a crisis, which she overcame by charitable work in the country around Årsta. In 1828, she debuted as a writer, anonomously, with a series of novels published until 1831, and was soon followed by others. Her novels were romantic stories of the time and concentrates on women in the marriage market; either beautiful and superficial, or unattractive with no hope of joining it, and the person telling the story and watching them is often an independent woman. She wanted a new kind of family life, not focused only on the men of the family, that would allow for women to develop their own talents and personality. By the 1840s, she was an acknowledged part of the culture life in Sweden and was translated to many languages. Politically, she was a liberal, but also felt symphaty for the socialism of the English working class movement
Charles Meynier
Charles Meynier (1763, Paris - 1832, Paris) was a French painter. A student of François-Andre Vincent, Meynier won the second prize in the 1789 prix de Rome competition. He made designs for the bas-reliefs and statues on the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel and was, from 1816 onward, a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts
Carl Fredrik Hill
Swedish Painter, 1849-1911,Swedish painter and draughtsman. He grew up in the university city of Lund, where his father was a mathematics professor. Despite severe opposition from his father, he studied landscape painting at the Konstakademi in Stockholm (1871-2), under Johan Edvard Bergh and Per Daniel Holm (1835-1903). He also frequently copied Dutch Old Masters, particularly Jacob van Ruisdael. After seeing the work that Alfred Wahlberg had sent home from Paris, Hill began to abandon his initial approach to form and colour, and he left for Paris in November 1873. His most important experience there was his encounter with the painting of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: 'Corot has discovered a new world, because he has discovered a new way of looking at the old', he wrote in a letter. Other contemporary French painters Hill admired were Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, Charles-Fran?ois Daubigny, Jean-Franeois Millet and Theodore Rousseau. From Courbet he learnt how to use colour to suggest the surface texture of stone quarries and gravel hills. In Barbizon in 1874 and 1875 Hill met the Hungarian painters Laszlo Pael and Mihaly von Muncacsy. His paintings of this time, for example Autumn Landscape, Evening: Fontainebleau (1875; Malm?, Kstmus.), are characterized by their dark 'luminarism' and their debt to Corot's later works.