Lot Essay
The appearance on the market of a major work by Holman Hunt is a notable event. Although his drawings are no strangers to the saleroom, indeed a family collection was sold in 1985, paintings of real significance are virtually never seen. The last to appear at auction, as long ago as 1973, was Rienzi (private collection), an early work of 1848-9, painted according to Pre-Raphaelite principles but before the artist had got into his stride as one of their leading exponents. The reason for this scarcity is obvious. Hunt's whole artistic philosophy ensured that he worked painstakingly and slowly, expending his energies on a few major pictorial statements. The results are essentially public works and have long been in public collections. In England there are examples in the Tate and the Guildhall Art Gallery in London, in many of the great regional galleries - Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Port Sunlight and elsewhere; and in the chapel of Keble College, Oxford. In America the Wadsworth Athenaeum at Hartford, Connecticut, and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard have works of like calibre, and in Australia there are outstanding items at Melbourne and Adelaide. Nothing comparable is to be found in Europe.
Despite the rarity of his work, Hunt needs little introduction. As everyone knows, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was launched in 1848 with two complementary objectives: to replace what Hunt described as 'the frivolous art of the day' with serious, thought-provoking subjects, and to subvert the academic conventions that had prevailed since the time of Raphael by painting every detail of a picture direct from nature. There were seven Brothers in all, but only three, Hunt himself, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, were artists of true stature. In talent and temperament they could hardly have been more different. If Millais was the brilliant technician and Rossetti the bohemian visionary, then Hunt was the zealous, indeed fanatical seeker after truth. The son of a warehouse manager in the City, he had to overcome fierce parental opposition to his choice of career. Nor, like his precocious friend Millais, was he an outstanding student; in fact he only gained admission to the Royal Academy Schools at the third attempt. These early setbacks hardened an innate puritanism, and he was to pursue his career in a spirit of moral fervour and dogged determination. It is not too much to say that the element of struggle was essential to Hunt, just as other artists need the stimulus of a particular piece of countryside or model.
Given Hunt's tenacious character, it is not surprising that he remained more faithful to the original Pre-Raphelite tenets than any of his fellow Brothers. Evelyn Waugh, who was related to him by marriage, called him 'the only Pre-Raphaelite'. It is true that his later work shows some broadening of touch, but there are none of the dramatic developments and radical revisions that we find in Rossetti and Millais. In fact Hunt took Pre-Raphaelite values to their perfectly logical conclusion by paying a series of visits to the East to paint Biblical events on the very spot where they had occured. The first took place in 1854-5 and produced that bizarre, tormented masterpiece, The Scapegoat (Port Sunlight), as well as seeing the start of The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (Birmingham). Other visits followed in 1869-72, 1875-78 and 1892. Each resulted in some great religious work expressing the concept of symbolic realism that Hunt had been inspired to develop by an early reading of Ruskin's Modern Painters.
Hunt was not such an outsider as the increasingly reclusive Rossetti, but he was never an establishment figure like Millais who, for all his youthful rebellion, found his true spiritual home in the Royal Academy and indeed ended up as its President. Hunt ceased to exhibit at the Academy in 1874, preferring to show his work at dealers' galleries or at the Grosvenor Gallery, which opened in Bond Street in 1877 as a liberal alternative to the Academy and quickly established itself as a forum of artistic innovation and the flagship of the Aesthetic Movement. This did not, however, mean that he lacked worldly success. On the contrary, his painstaking reconstructions of Biblical events, replete with typological symbolism, sold for enormous prices. Ernest Gambart paid ¨5,500 for The Finding of the Saviour, and Agnew's no less than ¨10,500 for The Shadow of Death (1870-73; Manchester). He also received official recognition, being awarded the newly instituted Order of Merit and an Oxford DCL in 1905. That year, by now indisputably the grand old man of the movement, he published his autobiography, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a massive two-volume apologia, biased and self-justificatory, but in its way brilliantly written and still an indispensable source for the scholar. He died five years later, outlived by only one other PRB, William Michael Rossetti.
The present picture, which has never left the family of the artist and sitter, is the third of a trilogy of portraits that Hunt painted of his children. His position as the leading religious painter of his day did not preclude a strong attraction to the opposite sex. Indeed the tension which we so often sense in his work would seem to betray some deep-seated conflict in the psyche of the artist himself. Whatever the case, after an erratic early life, entertainingly described by his grand-daughter Diana Holman-Hunt in her book My Grandfather, His Wives and Loves (1969), Hunt settled for matrimony in 1865 at the age of thirty-eight, marrying Fanny Waugh, the daughter of a prosperous London chemist. In August the following year, when Fanny was seven months pregnant, they set out for what would have been Hunt's second visit to the East, and on 20 December 1866 she died at Florence after giving birth to a son. He was named Cyril Benoni (Hebrew for 'child of sorrow'). Nine years later Hunt married Fanny's younger sister Edith, flouting the Table of Affinities, outraging her family, and causing a permanent rift with his fellow PRB Thomas Woolner, who had married another Waugh daughter. Of this second marriage there were two children, Gladys, born in 1878, and Hilary Lushington, born on 6 May 1879.
Cyril was painted first, in a picture, smaller than ours, showing the sitter holding a boater and fishing-rod (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). It was begun in 1873 but not finally completed and dated until 1880. Gladys was the subject of a more 'fancy' picture, Miss Flamborough, a character from The Vicar of Wakefield (1882; private collection), and Hilary completed the series in the present work. All three portraits were exhibited at the Grosvenor, Master Hilary appearing there in 1887. This was the last time that Hunt contributed to the Gallery's summer exhibitions. Questions had recently been raised about the way it was run, and in 1888, together with Whistler, Burne-Jones and other luminaries, he would transfer his support to the New Gallery, opened that year in Regent Street by two former directors of the Grosvenor to carry on the same traditions.
Hilary had first appeared in his father's work as the Christ Child in The Triumph of the Innocents (1876-87; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), and other early studies of him are reproduced in Hunt's autobiography. In our picture he is seen through the glass of a French window, we ourselves standing outside with the painter, looking into a shadowed room, the child inside looking out. He has stuck a design on the glass with sealing wax, and is about to trace it against the light with the stick of coloured chalk which he holds in his right hand. At his feet are a box of paints, his paint brushes in a glass of water, and an upturned white china plate which he presumably uses as a palette. The conception must have been suggested to Hunt by seeing his son engaged in this way, and the motif no doubt appealed to him because it embodied that element of quirkiness of which he, like all the Pre-Raphaelites, were fond.
Although the picture is dated 1886, when Hilary was seven, it was planned by the end of 1885 when Hunt wrote to an unidentified correspondent asking for information about 'any Xmas Carols which may be running about. The fact is I am now just intending to take up a subject in which such printed and illustrated songs will be a prominent feature, and I wish to have the best choice that offers' (MS fragment, dated by Edith Holman Hunt 16 December 1885, Rylands Library, University of Manchester, Eng.MS.1216/26). A preparatory drawing of the sitter holding up a blank sheet of paper against a window (Fig.1) dates from this period, and shows the boy looking perceptibly younger than he does in the finished picture. However as the picture progressed Hunt substituted for 'Xmas Carols' a design of 'Over the Hills & Far Away' from Walter Crane's The Baby's Opera: A Book of Old Rhymes with New Dresses, engraved and colour-printed by Edmund Evans in 1877. The design shows a shepherd and two shepherdesses listening to a tune played by Tom the piper's son; above are two staves of music with the text 'O-ver the hills and a great way off, The wind shall blow my top-knot off', followed by the verse:
Tom with his pipe made such a noise
That he pleased both the girls and boys,
And they stopped to hear him play,
"Over the hills and far away".
Over the hills, etc.
There are several possible reasons why Hunt changed the image that Hilary is tracing. 'Xmas Carols' may have seemed appropriate in December, but as spring and summer came round something a little more pastoral was surely called for. In fact we know that Hunt was thinking in 'pastoral' terms at this date since the second picture we showed at the Grosvenor in 1887 was Amaryllis (private collection), in which a shepherd girl is seen piping. We also know that Hunt was in touch with Crane in 1886 because in August the two artists, together with George Clausen, signed a letter to The Times urging the establishment of a truly representative exhibiting society of British artists in opposition to the Royal Academy. But perhaps we need look no further than the fact that the portrait, appropriately enough for a Grosvenor exhibit, presents a very 'aesthetic' image. It is painted in the 'greenery, yallery' tones that W.S. Gilbert had mocked in Patience in 1881, and Hilary is seen in 'aesthetic' dress - blouse, knickerbockers and stockings. There could be no more suitable attribute for an 'aesthetic' child (unless possibly a hoop) than one of Walter Crane's picture-books.
Hunt was the last person to paint a conventional portrait of a child, full of superficial charm. While the picture is undoubtedly appealing, it is slightly disturbing too, and this is largely due to a sense of dislocation resulting from the fact that we do not immediately realise that we are looking at the child through glass. His image is so clear that this only becomes apparent when we 'read' the picture closely, noting the position of the glazing-bars in relation to the foreground details and curtain, the reflections in the glass of the Japanese anemones, the jasmine and the butterfly outside in the garden, the swirls of green refracted light below the sitter's right elbow and above the song-sheet, and the blanching of the palm and fingertips of his left hand as he presses them against the window. This delight in spacial ambiguity is typical of Hunt, who explored comparable effects in such subject pictures as The Awakening Conscience (1853-4; Tate Gallery) and The Lady of Shalott (versions 1850-1905 at Melbourne, Manchester and Hartford, Conn.).
The window in question belonged to the drawing-room at Draycott Lodge, New King's Road, Fulham (now the site of a primary school until recently named after the painter). The Hunts had moved to this Regency villa, conveniently close to such artist friends as Burne-Jones, William Morris and William Blake Richmond, in January 1883. Still an oasis of 'country' amid a rapidly advancing suburbia, it had an old walled garden and the stucco exterior was partially covered with well-established creepers. A photograph of the house which illustrates Alice Meynell's description of Hunt's home and studio, published in the Art Annual for 1893 (Fig.2), shows the drawing-room windows clearly, with the distinctive glazing-bars which we see in the picture; another, of the interior of the drawing-room (Fig.3),shows heavy curtains hanging at the windows and reveals what lies behind the boy's image. Mrs Meynell describes the room in some detail. 'Like all the rooms in the house, it is low and temperately lighted, the green that moves in the breeze close to the windows colouring its light. Its great length is, in fact, the length of three small drawing-rooms, of which the walls have been abolished.... The three rooms thus struck into one have a perspective of yellow walls, with here and there a Damascus lamp hanging, or Italian majolica deeply framed. Three doors, tall, and bearing china jars upon their broad cornices, face three windows that divide the room into alternate spaces of shadow and brightness. The beautiful colours of old Oriental rugs ... underlie coffers and seats of many times and manners.' 'The green that moves in the breeze close to the windows colouring its light' corresponds exactly to the creepers around the upper edges of the picture and the swirls of green refracted light already noted, just as the overall impression the description evokes of a shady interior glowing with rich antiquities explains the deep mysterious shadows behind the figure.
As Dr Judith Bronkhurst has suggested, Hunt's decision to paint his son from the garden may have been partly dictated by the fact that when he planned the picture he had no studio to work in. In January 1886 he informed the critic Harry Quilter that although he had given up his former studio at Chelsea, the one he was having built at the back of Draycott Lodge was not yet finished (MS. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA., HM 32330). However, it was in use by 6 March 1886 (W.M. Rossetti diary, MS. University of British Columbia, Angeli-Dennis Collection), and although the conception of the picture was now fixed it is unlikely that Hunt had actually begun work on the canvas. He was busy at this time organising an exhibition of his pictures at the Fine Art Society and writing a series of articles for the Contemporary Review.
When the picture appeared at the Grosvenor in 1887 the following quotation appeared in the catalogue: '"Be sure before painting to make a correct outline." - Old-fashioned Manual of Art'. Since this was altered to 'Be sure in commencing your drawing to make a perfect outline' when the picture was re-exhibited at Birmingham later that year (Hunt to Jonathan Pratt, 7 September 1887, MS. Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham, 94 c F fol.127), it was probably invented by the artist. The idea has a double significance. While obviously relevant to the subject of the picture, it was also a personal statement by Hunt, whose whole philosophy of art was based on the painstaking and accurate recording of objective reality.
The picture was poorly hung at the Grosvenor, near the door in the East Gallery, and received mixed notices. Despite a recent quarrel, Hunt's old friend and fellow PRB F.G. Stephens spoke up loyally in his capacity as art-critic of the Athenaeum, describing it as 'striking, vivid, and vigorous ... The style of painting is most animated and healthy - indeed, almost worthy of the artist's best time ... The face is painted with extraordinary force of light and colour, and the modelling is faultlessly solid and learned.' However even Stephens had some reservations, complaining that the picture was 'over-brilliant (if that can be), and needlessly hard and too sharply defined', while other critics had no hesitation in condemning it out of hand. 'But what shall be said', asked The Times, 'of the two extraordinary works sent by Mr Holman Hunt, "Amaryllis" and "Master Hilary, the Tracer"? By those who still retain a profound respect for the painter of "The Light of the World" as little will be said as possible, for it is only too plain that in both of these pictures Mr Hunt has allowed his learning to run into pedantry, and his devotion to what he calls nature to make him entirely oblivious of art.' Hunt had never been a 'comfortable' painter and once again he had demonstrated his ability to be controversial, arousing those feelings of disturbance and shock so often evoked by his early masterpieces.
It was often Hunt's practice to alter his pictures after their first showing, and this was the case with Master Hilary, which, because of repainting, arrived late for the Autumn Exhibition of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. On 7 September 1887 Hunt wrote to Jonathan Pratt, the Secretary: 'It had a great deal more to be done to it than I had calculated and at last I scarcely brought it in all parts to full completion' (MS. Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham, 94 c F fol.127). This reworking probably entailed moving the figure to the left and taking in the folds of the blouse billowing over the belt on the right. As Mary Bennett pointed out in the catalogue of the Hunt Exhibition of 1969 (loc. cit.), pentimenti reveal that originally the left leg was straighter. The alteration was no doubt made to reinforce the impression that the child is leaning heavily against the glass.
On this second showing the painting attracted a long and eulogistic notice in the Birmingham Daily Post:
Since our former note of this exhibition appeared the work promised by Mr W. Holman Hunt, and which was delayed, has been hung on a screen in the Long Room... It is so unlike the work by which it is surrounded that one is almost startled; but, judging by our own experience, the feeling wears off, and the longer we stay the more friendly do we become with Master Hilary. If we search for the notes of genius, as distinguished from talent, we may find them many and various ... but ever and always we shall find one characteristic present - distinction, strong individuality ... Now, in these two particulars Mr Holman Hunt bears the marks of genius unmistakably. There is no living painter who is more distinctive and individual than he. Every work by him is like a chapter of autobiography - a bit of the man's life ...
His "Master Hilary" is a portrait of a fine, healthy, earnest-eyed boy of about eight or ten, who stands at the window of a drawing-room in the act of tracing one of the illustrations from a popular child's book ... We can hardly say that this is a great subject: there are no deep or profound lessons ... But the picture is one which grew on us every minute we lingered over it; and, if not great in theme, it is greatly done ... There is no trace anywhere of haste or impatience; there is no trick doing duty for solid work. With marvellous patience and sureness of hand every essential fact is translated on the canvas; nothing is shirked, nothing passed over with slovenly speed.
The picture is reproduced in Hunt's autobiography (Fig.4), but with two striking differences. The knickerbockers are plain, not striped, and the cap which is now thrust through the belt projects from the boy's pocket. According to Diana Holman-Hunt (loc.cit.), these changes were made by E.R. Hughes, who acted as Hunt's studio assistant in later years when Hunt's eyesight was failing, notably by completing the large version of The Light of the World in St Paul's Cathedral. This certainly seems likely, the handling of these details, especially the cap, being different from that of the rest of the picture, and characteristic of Hughes. It is also said that the cap was added at the suggestion of Hunt's old friend Millais, who was often consulted by the artist on such matters. Whether or not this is true (and it should be noted that Millais had died nine years before the cap-less reproduction appeared in Pre-Raphaelitism), the addition is a stroke of genius. It contributes enormously to the picture's composition, decisively breaking the formerly rather monotonous right contour of the child's body. More important still, it provides a dramatic climax to the other touches of red (sealing-wax, stool-cover, paint-box, rose-hips) that occur elsewhere in the picture, balancing and setting off the touches of white (anemones, plate, jasmine, song-sheet) that represent the other dominant note in the subtle but distinctive colour scheme.
The portrait has an inscription on the back stating that Hunt gave it to Hilary in May 1900 on the boy's twenty-first birthday. It was included in Hunt's retrospective exhibition of 1906-7 (Leicester Galleries, London, Manchester and Liverpool), and remained in Hilary's possession until his death in 1949. It was then inherited by his daughter, Diana, who died last year. It was last seen in public when it was lent to the Hunt exhibition of 1969 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and Victoria and Albert Museum, London), one of the early milestones in the rehabilitation of Pre-Raphaelite painting which has been such a notable feature of taste in recent years.
This entry could not have been written without the help of Dr Judith Bronkhurst, who has generously allowed us to make free use of the fruits of her research. The picture will be included in the catalogue raisonné of the works of Holman Hunt which she is currently preparing. Dr Bronkhurst also asks us to acknowledge the assistance of Mrs Christine Bailiss of the Hammersmith and Fulham Archives and Local History Centre. We are very grateful to them both.
CAPTIONS:
Fig.1. William Holman Hunt, Study of his son Hilary for Master Hilary - The Tracer. Black chalk, 60 x 47.5cm. Private Collection
Fig.2. Draycott Lotdge, Fulham, showing the drawing-room windows from the outside
Fig.3. Interior of the drawing-room, Draycott Lodge
Fig.4. The painting as reproduced in Holman Hunt's autobiography, before the alterations made by E.R. Hughes
Despite the rarity of his work, Hunt needs little introduction. As everyone knows, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was launched in 1848 with two complementary objectives: to replace what Hunt described as 'the frivolous art of the day' with serious, thought-provoking subjects, and to subvert the academic conventions that had prevailed since the time of Raphael by painting every detail of a picture direct from nature. There were seven Brothers in all, but only three, Hunt himself, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, were artists of true stature. In talent and temperament they could hardly have been more different. If Millais was the brilliant technician and Rossetti the bohemian visionary, then Hunt was the zealous, indeed fanatical seeker after truth. The son of a warehouse manager in the City, he had to overcome fierce parental opposition to his choice of career. Nor, like his precocious friend Millais, was he an outstanding student; in fact he only gained admission to the Royal Academy Schools at the third attempt. These early setbacks hardened an innate puritanism, and he was to pursue his career in a spirit of moral fervour and dogged determination. It is not too much to say that the element of struggle was essential to Hunt, just as other artists need the stimulus of a particular piece of countryside or model.
Given Hunt's tenacious character, it is not surprising that he remained more faithful to the original Pre-Raphelite tenets than any of his fellow Brothers. Evelyn Waugh, who was related to him by marriage, called him 'the only Pre-Raphaelite'. It is true that his later work shows some broadening of touch, but there are none of the dramatic developments and radical revisions that we find in Rossetti and Millais. In fact Hunt took Pre-Raphaelite values to their perfectly logical conclusion by paying a series of visits to the East to paint Biblical events on the very spot where they had occured. The first took place in 1854-5 and produced that bizarre, tormented masterpiece, The Scapegoat (Port Sunlight), as well as seeing the start of The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (Birmingham). Other visits followed in 1869-72, 1875-78 and 1892. Each resulted in some great religious work expressing the concept of symbolic realism that Hunt had been inspired to develop by an early reading of Ruskin's Modern Painters.
Hunt was not such an outsider as the increasingly reclusive Rossetti, but he was never an establishment figure like Millais who, for all his youthful rebellion, found his true spiritual home in the Royal Academy and indeed ended up as its President. Hunt ceased to exhibit at the Academy in 1874, preferring to show his work at dealers' galleries or at the Grosvenor Gallery, which opened in Bond Street in 1877 as a liberal alternative to the Academy and quickly established itself as a forum of artistic innovation and the flagship of the Aesthetic Movement. This did not, however, mean that he lacked worldly success. On the contrary, his painstaking reconstructions of Biblical events, replete with typological symbolism, sold for enormous prices. Ernest Gambart paid ¨5,500 for The Finding of the Saviour, and Agnew's no less than ¨10,500 for The Shadow of Death (1870-73; Manchester). He also received official recognition, being awarded the newly instituted Order of Merit and an Oxford DCL in 1905. That year, by now indisputably the grand old man of the movement, he published his autobiography, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a massive two-volume apologia, biased and self-justificatory, but in its way brilliantly written and still an indispensable source for the scholar. He died five years later, outlived by only one other PRB, William Michael Rossetti.
The present picture, which has never left the family of the artist and sitter, is the third of a trilogy of portraits that Hunt painted of his children. His position as the leading religious painter of his day did not preclude a strong attraction to the opposite sex. Indeed the tension which we so often sense in his work would seem to betray some deep-seated conflict in the psyche of the artist himself. Whatever the case, after an erratic early life, entertainingly described by his grand-daughter Diana Holman-Hunt in her book My Grandfather, His Wives and Loves (1969), Hunt settled for matrimony in 1865 at the age of thirty-eight, marrying Fanny Waugh, the daughter of a prosperous London chemist. In August the following year, when Fanny was seven months pregnant, they set out for what would have been Hunt's second visit to the East, and on 20 December 1866 she died at Florence after giving birth to a son. He was named Cyril Benoni (Hebrew for 'child of sorrow'). Nine years later Hunt married Fanny's younger sister Edith, flouting the Table of Affinities, outraging her family, and causing a permanent rift with his fellow PRB Thomas Woolner, who had married another Waugh daughter. Of this second marriage there were two children, Gladys, born in 1878, and Hilary Lushington, born on 6 May 1879.
Cyril was painted first, in a picture, smaller than ours, showing the sitter holding a boater and fishing-rod (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge). It was begun in 1873 but not finally completed and dated until 1880. Gladys was the subject of a more 'fancy' picture, Miss Flamborough, a character from The Vicar of Wakefield (1882; private collection), and Hilary completed the series in the present work. All three portraits were exhibited at the Grosvenor, Master Hilary appearing there in 1887. This was the last time that Hunt contributed to the Gallery's summer exhibitions. Questions had recently been raised about the way it was run, and in 1888, together with Whistler, Burne-Jones and other luminaries, he would transfer his support to the New Gallery, opened that year in Regent Street by two former directors of the Grosvenor to carry on the same traditions.
Hilary had first appeared in his father's work as the Christ Child in The Triumph of the Innocents (1876-87; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), and other early studies of him are reproduced in Hunt's autobiography. In our picture he is seen through the glass of a French window, we ourselves standing outside with the painter, looking into a shadowed room, the child inside looking out. He has stuck a design on the glass with sealing wax, and is about to trace it against the light with the stick of coloured chalk which he holds in his right hand. At his feet are a box of paints, his paint brushes in a glass of water, and an upturned white china plate which he presumably uses as a palette. The conception must have been suggested to Hunt by seeing his son engaged in this way, and the motif no doubt appealed to him because it embodied that element of quirkiness of which he, like all the Pre-Raphaelites, were fond.
Although the picture is dated 1886, when Hilary was seven, it was planned by the end of 1885 when Hunt wrote to an unidentified correspondent asking for information about 'any Xmas Carols which may be running about. The fact is I am now just intending to take up a subject in which such printed and illustrated songs will be a prominent feature, and I wish to have the best choice that offers' (MS fragment, dated by Edith Holman Hunt 16 December 1885, Rylands Library, University of Manchester, Eng.MS.1216/26). A preparatory drawing of the sitter holding up a blank sheet of paper against a window (Fig.1) dates from this period, and shows the boy looking perceptibly younger than he does in the finished picture. However as the picture progressed Hunt substituted for 'Xmas Carols' a design of 'Over the Hills & Far Away' from Walter Crane's The Baby's Opera: A Book of Old Rhymes with New Dresses, engraved and colour-printed by Edmund Evans in 1877. The design shows a shepherd and two shepherdesses listening to a tune played by Tom the piper's son; above are two staves of music with the text 'O-ver the hills and a great way off, The wind shall blow my top-knot off', followed by the verse:
Tom with his pipe made such a noise
That he pleased both the girls and boys,
And they stopped to hear him play,
"Over the hills and far away".
Over the hills, etc.
There are several possible reasons why Hunt changed the image that Hilary is tracing. 'Xmas Carols' may have seemed appropriate in December, but as spring and summer came round something a little more pastoral was surely called for. In fact we know that Hunt was thinking in 'pastoral' terms at this date since the second picture we showed at the Grosvenor in 1887 was Amaryllis (private collection), in which a shepherd girl is seen piping. We also know that Hunt was in touch with Crane in 1886 because in August the two artists, together with George Clausen, signed a letter to The Times urging the establishment of a truly representative exhibiting society of British artists in opposition to the Royal Academy. But perhaps we need look no further than the fact that the portrait, appropriately enough for a Grosvenor exhibit, presents a very 'aesthetic' image. It is painted in the 'greenery, yallery' tones that W.S. Gilbert had mocked in Patience in 1881, and Hilary is seen in 'aesthetic' dress - blouse, knickerbockers and stockings. There could be no more suitable attribute for an 'aesthetic' child (unless possibly a hoop) than one of Walter Crane's picture-books.
Hunt was the last person to paint a conventional portrait of a child, full of superficial charm. While the picture is undoubtedly appealing, it is slightly disturbing too, and this is largely due to a sense of dislocation resulting from the fact that we do not immediately realise that we are looking at the child through glass. His image is so clear that this only becomes apparent when we 'read' the picture closely, noting the position of the glazing-bars in relation to the foreground details and curtain, the reflections in the glass of the Japanese anemones, the jasmine and the butterfly outside in the garden, the swirls of green refracted light below the sitter's right elbow and above the song-sheet, and the blanching of the palm and fingertips of his left hand as he presses them against the window. This delight in spacial ambiguity is typical of Hunt, who explored comparable effects in such subject pictures as The Awakening Conscience (1853-4; Tate Gallery) and The Lady of Shalott (versions 1850-1905 at Melbourne, Manchester and Hartford, Conn.).
The window in question belonged to the drawing-room at Draycott Lodge, New King's Road, Fulham (now the site of a primary school until recently named after the painter). The Hunts had moved to this Regency villa, conveniently close to such artist friends as Burne-Jones, William Morris and William Blake Richmond, in January 1883. Still an oasis of 'country' amid a rapidly advancing suburbia, it had an old walled garden and the stucco exterior was partially covered with well-established creepers. A photograph of the house which illustrates Alice Meynell's description of Hunt's home and studio, published in the Art Annual for 1893 (Fig.2), shows the drawing-room windows clearly, with the distinctive glazing-bars which we see in the picture; another, of the interior of the drawing-room (Fig.3),shows heavy curtains hanging at the windows and reveals what lies behind the boy's image. Mrs Meynell describes the room in some detail. 'Like all the rooms in the house, it is low and temperately lighted, the green that moves in the breeze close to the windows colouring its light. Its great length is, in fact, the length of three small drawing-rooms, of which the walls have been abolished.... The three rooms thus struck into one have a perspective of yellow walls, with here and there a Damascus lamp hanging, or Italian majolica deeply framed. Three doors, tall, and bearing china jars upon their broad cornices, face three windows that divide the room into alternate spaces of shadow and brightness. The beautiful colours of old Oriental rugs ... underlie coffers and seats of many times and manners.' 'The green that moves in the breeze close to the windows colouring its light' corresponds exactly to the creepers around the upper edges of the picture and the swirls of green refracted light already noted, just as the overall impression the description evokes of a shady interior glowing with rich antiquities explains the deep mysterious shadows behind the figure.
As Dr Judith Bronkhurst has suggested, Hunt's decision to paint his son from the garden may have been partly dictated by the fact that when he planned the picture he had no studio to work in. In January 1886 he informed the critic Harry Quilter that although he had given up his former studio at Chelsea, the one he was having built at the back of Draycott Lodge was not yet finished (MS. Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA., HM 32330). However, it was in use by 6 March 1886 (W.M. Rossetti diary, MS. University of British Columbia, Angeli-Dennis Collection), and although the conception of the picture was now fixed it is unlikely that Hunt had actually begun work on the canvas. He was busy at this time organising an exhibition of his pictures at the Fine Art Society and writing a series of articles for the Contemporary Review.
When the picture appeared at the Grosvenor in 1887 the following quotation appeared in the catalogue: '"Be sure before painting to make a correct outline." - Old-fashioned Manual of Art'. Since this was altered to 'Be sure in commencing your drawing to make a perfect outline' when the picture was re-exhibited at Birmingham later that year (Hunt to Jonathan Pratt, 7 September 1887, MS. Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham, 94 c F fol.127), it was probably invented by the artist. The idea has a double significance. While obviously relevant to the subject of the picture, it was also a personal statement by Hunt, whose whole philosophy of art was based on the painstaking and accurate recording of objective reality.
The picture was poorly hung at the Grosvenor, near the door in the East Gallery, and received mixed notices. Despite a recent quarrel, Hunt's old friend and fellow PRB F.G. Stephens spoke up loyally in his capacity as art-critic of the Athenaeum, describing it as 'striking, vivid, and vigorous ... The style of painting is most animated and healthy - indeed, almost worthy of the artist's best time ... The face is painted with extraordinary force of light and colour, and the modelling is faultlessly solid and learned.' However even Stephens had some reservations, complaining that the picture was 'over-brilliant (if that can be), and needlessly hard and too sharply defined', while other critics had no hesitation in condemning it out of hand. 'But what shall be said', asked The Times, 'of the two extraordinary works sent by Mr Holman Hunt, "Amaryllis" and "Master Hilary, the Tracer"? By those who still retain a profound respect for the painter of "The Light of the World" as little will be said as possible, for it is only too plain that in both of these pictures Mr Hunt has allowed his learning to run into pedantry, and his devotion to what he calls nature to make him entirely oblivious of art.' Hunt had never been a 'comfortable' painter and once again he had demonstrated his ability to be controversial, arousing those feelings of disturbance and shock so often evoked by his early masterpieces.
It was often Hunt's practice to alter his pictures after their first showing, and this was the case with Master Hilary, which, because of repainting, arrived late for the Autumn Exhibition of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. On 7 September 1887 Hunt wrote to Jonathan Pratt, the Secretary: 'It had a great deal more to be done to it than I had calculated and at last I scarcely brought it in all parts to full completion' (MS. Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham, 94 c F fol.127). This reworking probably entailed moving the figure to the left and taking in the folds of the blouse billowing over the belt on the right. As Mary Bennett pointed out in the catalogue of the Hunt Exhibition of 1969 (loc. cit.), pentimenti reveal that originally the left leg was straighter. The alteration was no doubt made to reinforce the impression that the child is leaning heavily against the glass.
On this second showing the painting attracted a long and eulogistic notice in the Birmingham Daily Post:
Since our former note of this exhibition appeared the work promised by Mr W. Holman Hunt, and which was delayed, has been hung on a screen in the Long Room... It is so unlike the work by which it is surrounded that one is almost startled; but, judging by our own experience, the feeling wears off, and the longer we stay the more friendly do we become with Master Hilary. If we search for the notes of genius, as distinguished from talent, we may find them many and various ... but ever and always we shall find one characteristic present - distinction, strong individuality ... Now, in these two particulars Mr Holman Hunt bears the marks of genius unmistakably. There is no living painter who is more distinctive and individual than he. Every work by him is like a chapter of autobiography - a bit of the man's life ...
His "Master Hilary" is a portrait of a fine, healthy, earnest-eyed boy of about eight or ten, who stands at the window of a drawing-room in the act of tracing one of the illustrations from a popular child's book ... We can hardly say that this is a great subject: there are no deep or profound lessons ... But the picture is one which grew on us every minute we lingered over it; and, if not great in theme, it is greatly done ... There is no trace anywhere of haste or impatience; there is no trick doing duty for solid work. With marvellous patience and sureness of hand every essential fact is translated on the canvas; nothing is shirked, nothing passed over with slovenly speed.
The picture is reproduced in Hunt's autobiography (Fig.4), but with two striking differences. The knickerbockers are plain, not striped, and the cap which is now thrust through the belt projects from the boy's pocket. According to Diana Holman-Hunt (loc.cit.), these changes were made by E.R. Hughes, who acted as Hunt's studio assistant in later years when Hunt's eyesight was failing, notably by completing the large version of The Light of the World in St Paul's Cathedral. This certainly seems likely, the handling of these details, especially the cap, being different from that of the rest of the picture, and characteristic of Hughes. It is also said that the cap was added at the suggestion of Hunt's old friend Millais, who was often consulted by the artist on such matters. Whether or not this is true (and it should be noted that Millais had died nine years before the cap-less reproduction appeared in Pre-Raphaelitism), the addition is a stroke of genius. It contributes enormously to the picture's composition, decisively breaking the formerly rather monotonous right contour of the child's body. More important still, it provides a dramatic climax to the other touches of red (sealing-wax, stool-cover, paint-box, rose-hips) that occur elsewhere in the picture, balancing and setting off the touches of white (anemones, plate, jasmine, song-sheet) that represent the other dominant note in the subtle but distinctive colour scheme.
The portrait has an inscription on the back stating that Hunt gave it to Hilary in May 1900 on the boy's twenty-first birthday. It was included in Hunt's retrospective exhibition of 1906-7 (Leicester Galleries, London, Manchester and Liverpool), and remained in Hilary's possession until his death in 1949. It was then inherited by his daughter, Diana, who died last year. It was last seen in public when it was lent to the Hunt exhibition of 1969 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and Victoria and Albert Museum, London), one of the early milestones in the rehabilitation of Pre-Raphaelite painting which has been such a notable feature of taste in recent years.
This entry could not have been written without the help of Dr Judith Bronkhurst, who has generously allowed us to make free use of the fruits of her research. The picture will be included in the catalogue raisonné of the works of Holman Hunt which she is currently preparing. Dr Bronkhurst also asks us to acknowledge the assistance of Mrs Christine Bailiss of the Hammersmith and Fulham Archives and Local History Centre. We are very grateful to them both.
CAPTIONS:
Fig.1. William Holman Hunt, Study of his son Hilary for Master Hilary - The Tracer. Black chalk, 60 x 47.5cm. Private Collection
Fig.2. Draycott Lotdge, Fulham, showing the drawing-room windows from the outside
Fig.3. Interior of the drawing-room, Draycott Lodge
Fig.4. The painting as reproduced in Holman Hunt's autobiography, before the alterations made by E.R. Hughes