William Holman Hunt at the MIA

We will undertake a bit of time travel as we enter Sin and Salvation, to the Victorian Age in England. What do we think of when we hear the word “Victorian” today? […]

One dictionary definition I came across is, “A stifling and prudish moral earnestness.” In design we think of excessive ornamentation, even fussy clutter. Whatever overtones the word “Victorian” has for you, you will find them in the world of William Holman Hunt.

The opening painting and the cover art for the exhibition catalogue, is, today, Hunt’s most famous work. In it we find almost all the themes we will see today as we look at a remarkable collection of the key works in Hunt’s entire career.

Look closely. Hunt’s paintings invite, nay require, close inspection. There are clues in every inch of the canvas. We are not used to this kind of painting today, but as I said, we are in a different, Victorian world. This is not a portrait, or a landscape, or a genre scene. This picture is telling a story. What is happening? A woman is rising from the embrace of a man. Are they married? Which is her only finger without a ring? What time of day is it? What kind of woman would be sitting in the lap of a gentleman not her husband in the morning?

There are other clues that this is a kept woman. This is a petticoat we see, so her skirt has been removed. Hunt copied a courtesan’s chambers  to capture an accurate setting. But which of the characters is presented more sympathetically, the kept woman, or the man who keeps her? The woman is in the light, wearing white, and on the right side of the picture – all clues that Hunt used to indicate virtue. The title of the picture seals the deal: The Awakening Conscience. The woman sees that her life of prostitution is immoral, her conscience awakens, she rises from the man’s lap and spies a better life, symbolized by the sunshine on the leaves outside the window she looks upon.

Let’s go back five years, to the painting that launched Hunt’s involvement with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry, more simply known, from the poem that is its source, as The Eve of St. Agnes. Hunt painted this for the Royal Academy when he was only 21, and you can tell from a glance that it is slightly less sophisticated than The Awakening Conscience. But the moralizing is just as plain. On the right side, in the light, with white around their heads, are the good guys, Madeline and Porphyro, who, according to the poem by John Keats, are exemplars of true love. On the left, in shadow, are the drunken guards, in no position to stop the lovers from escaping.

What do these two paintings have in common? They tell a story. And the story involves…sex. While Porphyro and Madeline represent true love, there is also the fact that they have just had sex, before they are married. This was verboten under the moral codes of Victorian England, but what 21-year-old male would not have been secretly thrilled at the prospect? The lovers here are fully clothed, just as they were in Awakening Conscience, but notice how lustily Hunt has described Madeline’s legs under her purple garment. And how prominent he has painted the belt hanging down between Porphyro’s legs.

Am I going too fast? If not, let’s look at another famous painting, done between the first two we have seen.  Valentine Rescuing Silvia from Proteus is the climactic scene in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. When a Victorian wanted to paint a sex scene, it was easier to illustrate a Shakespeare play or a Keats poem, which is one reason that Awakening Conscience was such a radical work. Here, briefly, Proteus, on his left knee, has been thwarted in his attempt to rape the beautiful Silvia by the intervention of the standing Valentine, who happens to be Silvia’s fiancé and Proteus’s best friend. Oh, and by the way, Proteus’s own fiancée, Julia, stands leaning against a tree, having watched the action while disguised as a boy page. But let’s move past Hunt’s repressed sexuality to another common thread of these works: beautiful colors and exquisite attention to detail.

Holman Hunt grew up in the textile trade: his father and grandfather managed a textile warehouse, and Hunt’s first job, at age 14, was for a textile printer. Hunt was fascinated by fabric his entire life, and in a later gallery you will see some of the costumes that Hunt collected on his trips to the Middle East. Look here at Silvia’s ravishing dress with floral patterns. More amazing is Julia’s purple shift, which seems more liquid than cloth. And look at those slippers!

Hunt and his brother painters are commonly said to follow the credo, Truth to Nature. To my eyes, however, there is nothing natural about the scenes he paints. They are more theatrical than the theater. And the woods behind these four characters might as well be a painted backdrop. What is beyond dispute is that Hunt made a religion of Attention to Detail. Much is made of the fact that Hunt went into the woods to get the light and shadows just right. And every leaf and mushroom in the foreground is painted with excruciating exactitude. Instead of a realism, this is a hyper-realism.

One more work from the same period sums up Hunt’s obsessions. Claudio and Isabella is taken from another Shakespeare play, Measure for Measure. And the subject again is…sex. Claudio has impregnated his fiancee before they are married and will be executed as a result, unless he can get his sister, a nun, to sleep with the Duke’s deputy. The “good” is on the right side, in white, in the light. The “bad” is cowering in the shadows, on the left. Outside his prison is the sun-dappled apple tree, painted with attention to detail. New pigments for the artist, and the textile dyer, have just been invented, and Hunt is among the first to exploit them: look at how bright the red ribbon is behind the lute. But for the most exquisite colors, we turn to what many consider Hunt’s finest work: Our English Coast, 1852.

One reason many prefer this is, it is devoid of theatricality and repressed sex. It is the only painting in the show that has no human figures. What it does have is spectacular greens, a stunningly realistic view of the English coast, and water so blue it recalls the Caribbean Sea more than the English Channel. Luxuriate in those blues awhile. The green pigment was called emerald green, and it was made with arsenic. Once people started dying from it, it was taken out of circulation. Hunt’s obsession with capturing the light and the colors led him to paint this work almost entirely out-of-doors, very unusual at that time. Look at the light glowing through this sheep’s ear.

Finally, in this gallery, let me say one word about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, for they are in the title of this show. Hunt and six like-minded artists and writers got together in 1848 and did what artistic 21-year-olds do in a straitlaced society. They decided to rebel against convention, including artistic convention as it was being taught at the Royal Academy in London. They painted together, held poetry readings, loved the same women, put out a magazine, and mysteriously signed their works, “PRB.” Rather quickly they went their own ways, and in five years the Brotherhood was disbanded. Because three of them, however, were quite good and distinctive painters, and because they influenced British art for the rest of the century, the Pre-Raphaelites live on in art history and, for this show, are a handy marketing tool. The only examples by other Pre-Raphaelite artists and their followers are around us, and I would just point out two:

John Everett Millais was Hunt’s closest friend and was the most socially successful of the group. His painting Peace Concluded is in the MIA’s permanent collection and was called, by one critic, the most important British painting of its time. Millais had left the PRB behind by the time he painted this, but you can still see similarities: he is telling a story, and there is great attention to detail. Throughout the picture are visual clues, just as we saw in The Awakening Conscience. The most influential of the three founding Brotherhood painters was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A wonderful example of his work during his PRB years is on that wall – note the “PRB” below his signature. But he is best known for the languorous redheads he painted in the 1860s and ‘70s and for founding the Esthetic Movement, which influenced James McNeill Whistler and many others.

Hunt remained aware of Rossetti’s new style, and if you look into the next gallery you will see a single redhead based on several women in Hunt’s own life.

 In this room, Hunt doesn’t beat around the bush: here he paints the women he loved. First was his model, Annie Miller. She was the model for this absolutely ravishing work called Il Dolce far Niente, translated for us as “sweet nothings.” You may remember her red hair from The Awakening Conscience. Hunt found her in the gutter, tried to educate her so she could be a proper wife, but ungrateful, she left him for another man, and actually made him pay her L1,000 to get his love letters back.

Hunt’s next love was the socially more respectable Fanny Waugh, who, however, was an independent spirit like Hunt and modeled for his paintings before they became lovers. She died after childbirth in 1866, less than a year after their marriage, and you can see a beautiful, if somewhat tragic, drawing of her on that wall.

Although Hunt mourned Fanny deeply for ten years, he was attracted to other women as well. One was an American he met in Florence, whom he painted as the character Bianca from yet another Shakespeare play, The Taming of the Shrew. Hunt’s fascination with fabric is on full display, as well as his interest in his girlfriend’s full figure.

The painting to the left is of Fanny’s sister Edith, on her 21^st birthday. Edith had become a surrogate mother to Fanny and William’s son, and seven years after this painting, Edith and Hunt (age 48) were married in Switzerland – because English law (the Table of Affinities) forbade their marriage. Incidentally, Edith and Hunt, who by then was quite prominent, campaigned against this ridiculous prohibition, and in 1907 Parliament passed the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act, which sanctioned their union.

The next chapter in Hunt’s story takes us to Palestine. He spent more than six years there, between 1854 and 1878, in quest of religious truth. Hunt was not a follower of organized religion, but he was a seeker of spiritual faith. This was magnified after the death of his first wife. Just as he had gone outside to paint the English coast, or the woods for the Gentlemen of Verona, Hunt believed he could only find Christ if he went to the place he had lived, Palestine.

This gallery is dominated by Hunt’s major work from 1854, his first trip to the Middle East, one year after The Awakening Conscience. Not surprisingly, Hunt looked for a female model. He could find no woman who would take off her veil in Cairo; so he moved to the countryside where he could sketch a farm girl. It’s doubtful whether the finished work bears much resemblance to an Egyptian woman, and the bare chest and arms are, in my mind, continuations of Hunt’s sexual longing. What one is to make of the 21 pigeons is a mystery, unless Hunt felt the need to animate an otherwise static portrait. What most interested Hunt, though, was the bright light of Egypt, which he has tried to capture in the late afternoon, early evening, titling the painting The Afterglow in Egypt.

There is nothing overtly religious about The Afterglow, but this is more than compensated for by another work begun on the same trip to the Holy Land, The Finding of the Savior in the Temple is meant to illustrate a scene from the gospel of Luke, in which Mary and Joseph accidentally leave the 12-year-old Jesus behind in Jerusalem. Finding him deep in discussion with rabbis in the temple, they say how worried they have been. He inscrutably answers, Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house? The painting’s strength is also its weakness: Hunt’s overly detailed description of everything in the scene, some of which is unnecessary and detracts from any overall impact the composition might have. The figure of Jesus looks like he doesn’t belong, which is partly because Hunt was trying to indicate Jesus’s divinity in contrast to Mary’s humanity – and maybe partly because Hunt couldn’t find an appropriate Jewish youth willing to model and had to use an English Christian boy for the role.

Despite my reservations, the painting sold for L5,000, the highest price ever paid for a painting at that time, and put Hunt on the path to becoming a rich man. Politically, the painting is also notable for Hunt’s conscious effort to merge the three religions of the Holy Land: the Jewish rabbis, the Christian Savior, and the Muslim mosque, where the scene is set.

Having achieved wealth and fame from this work, Hunt returned to the Holy Land and struck gold again with the next painting we will look at, The Shadow of Death. Hunt is now the highest-paid artist in England, and he produces paintings like Stephen Spielberg produces movies today. He will spend a year or more on a single painting, and when it is finished, it will be exhibited as a spectacle unto itself, with patrons paying to see it. The right to make prints will be sold, and prints will be bought by households all over the country. This I would call a gimmick picture. It is not moralizing or teaching; it is just illustrating. The most interesting aspect is the figure of Mary, bending over the gifts from the Magi and wearing a beautiful blue robe and jewelry, hardly the outfit of a lowly carpenter’s wife. We have also been assured that this is the only known rear view of the Virgin in Western art.

In Hunt’s travels to Palestine he has also come to appreciate Islamic art, which he refers to in the frame he designed for this painting.

In the last gallery we will look at the smallest painting and the largest painting in the show, which between them sum up Sin and Salvation.

The Light of the World is a manifesto of Hunt’s art, minus the sex. It shows his fascination with capturing light on canvas: he painted the background at night, under real moonlight. As for Christ’s light, he had a lantern made so he could study how the light it cast would fall. Attention to detail is there: every leaf and vine is individually painted. And there is the theatrical narrative, the earnest moral: I am the Light of the World, knocking on the door of the human soul; there is no handle, it can only be opened from the inside. And judging by the overgrown vegetation, it is rarely opened. Hunt painted three versions: this is the second. Fifty years later, Hunt painted a somewhat more masculine version, five times as big, that toured the world, including Australia and North America, was widely reproduced, and was hailed as the greatest religious allegory in English painting.

During the same years, working with an assistant because his eyesight was failing, Hunt, now in his 70s, painted The Lady of Shalott. The flowing red hair harkens back to the early works, as does the myriad of details, the bright colors, the sexual tension, the moralizing story, and its source in a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The Lady was consigned to her tower, fated to create a tapestry that would glorify the Camelot of King Arthur. She was only to observe the outside world through a mirror; if she looked upon it directly, a curse would kill her. She could not, however, resist the attraction of the handsomest knight in the land, who rode past, and, “Tirra lirra, by the river, Sang Sir Lancelot.” The Lady looked out the window, the curse fell upon her, her tapestry unravels, the mirror cracks, and she is en route to passing through Camelot, dead in a prow. Hunt has again shown us a beautiful woman, wildly flowing red hair, and dare I point out, an excess of detail and ornamentation.

As with the Light of the World, Hunt has made this oversized painting 50 years after he first worked on the subject. Think what else has happened in the art world in the interim: Impressionism has come and gone. Van Gogh died in 1890, Seurat in 1891, Gauguin in 1903. Picasso in 1904 is painting in his Blue Period and is about to paint Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the beacon of modern art. Queen Victoria herself died in 1901. Hunt finished The Light of the World in 1904 and The Lady of Shalott in 1905. For William Holman Hunt, the Victoria Era never ended. But this tour has.