Who Was William Holman Hunt?

If you grew up anywhere in the English-speaking world before about 1950, you have probably seen a William Holman Hunt painting hanging in a church or a schoolroom, even without knowing the name. He lived from 1827 to 1910, worked from London for most of his life, and helped found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. Of its three founding painters, the others being John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he was the one who never wandered off. His pictures marry obsessive detail to a fierce Evangelical Christianity and a stubborn belief that art ought to mean something. The famous ones include "The Light of the World," "The Awakening Conscience," "The Scapegoat," and "The Lady of Shalott."

William Holman Hunt, self portrait, 1867. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Below we walk through his early life and training, his part in starting the Brotherhood, the paintings he is remembered for, the faith that drove all of it, his tangled private life, and the legacy he left.

Who was William Holman Hunt?

He was an English painter, and a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Nobody in the group held on harder to its creed of detailed realism and serious moral purpose, with religious sincerity on top. The others changed. Millais went after commercial success, and Rossetti drifted toward the Aesthetic Movement. Hunt kept painting the way the seven of them had set out to, for more than sixty years (stubbornness or integrity, depending on who's telling it).

His name, to begin with, was plain William Hunt. He was born on April 2, 1827, in Cheapside, London, the son of a warehouse manager. The "Holman" came later. It came from his mother's maiden name, Hobman, and he tacked it on as a young man so people would stop mixing him up with another working painter of the same name.

What stuck was the collision of microscopic realism and loaded Christian symbolism, with faith at the center of it. For Bible scenes he went to the Middle East, Palestine above all, to get them right. Honors came late, and they came big. He outlived both John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and ended as an elder statesman of British art. When he died in 1910, they buried him at Saint Paul's Cathedral.

What was Hunt's early life and education?

Cheapside, 1827: a solid lower-middle-class household, run by a warehouse manager who was not at all sure his son should be an artist. So the boy went out to work as a clerk for a stretch. He only got to study seriously once he'd talked his parents around.

Getting into the Royal Academy schools took years. He studied part time, squeezing it around paid work, and they finally took him in 1844, when he was seventeen. Nothing about it was a glide. Somewhere in those rooms he fell in with a fellow student named Millais, and the two stayed friends for life.

Then a book got hold of him. John Ruskin's "Modern Painters," whose first volume had appeared in 1843, demanded truth to nature, and that gave him the principle he'd defend for the rest of his life. Reading it, he admitted later, had more or less decided his direction for him.

In 1848 came the Brotherhood. He was one of seven, and he did a good share of putting their beliefs into words. His first canvases tested the theory. "Rienzi" (1849) shows the medieval Roman tribune swearing vengeance over his murdered brother. Close behind it came "A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids" (quite a title), which brought fine finish to the kind of weighty religious subject he'd come back to again and again.

What was Hunt's role in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?

He was the anchor. Of all the founders he held to strict practice the longest, and the hardest. As for the other six, Millais and Rossetti you've met already. James Collinson painted, and Thomas Woolner was the sculptor. Frederic George Stephens was the critic, William Michael Rossetti the writer (yes, two Rossettis). Inside the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt was the conscience. Rossetti had the color and the feverish imagination, Millais the sheer technical brilliance. His own contribution was less glamorous: he kept insisting on observation, and on art that carried moral weight.

By 1853 the formal group had effectively dissolved. Hunt carried on regardless, as though the original program still held, the self-appointed keeper of the true flame. Even the painters who'd gone their own way respected him for that. Ford Madox Brown, who stayed close to the circle without ever formally joining, was cordial with him throughout. Then there was the critic John Ruskin, the movement's great champion. Late in life he wrote it all down in a two-volume memoir, "Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood," published in 1905. Historians still lean on it as a primary source (read it knowing it's his side of things).

What are Hunt's most famous paintings?

Seven canvases carry his reputation. They cover his whole working life, from "The Hireling Shepherd" in 1851 to "The Lady of Shalott," which he didn't let go of until 1905. Most of them stayed in Britain. Tate Britain and Manchester have their share, and so do the Lady Lever and the Walker, with a long list of other British museums behind them.

"The Light of the World" is the famous one, painted between 1851 and 1853. Christ stands, lantern in hand, at a door nobody has opened for so long that weeds have grown over it. The whole image illustrates a single line from Revelation 3:20: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock." The door is the human heart. That idea traveled. The picture toured the world and became one of the most reproduced religious images of the century, and several versions exist. The original hangs at Keble College, part of Oxford University, with a later large one at Saint Paul's. We'd go to Keble first.

Indoors, in "The Awakening Conscience" (1853), he plays the same trick in a Victorian sitting room. A young woman gets up mid-song from her lover's lap, struck by sudden clarity, and nothing in the room around her is innocent. A cat toys with a trapped bird. Someone has dropped a glove on the floor. On the piano lies Thomas Moore's "Oft in the Stilly Night" (he meant you to read the room object by object). It hangs at Tate Britain.

Then there's "The Scapegoat" (1854-1856), the strange one, and it nearly broke him. He hauled a live goat down to the shore of the Dead Sea and painted there for long stretches. He fought the heat, and the isolation. Ottoman Palestine was politically unstable on top of that. All to capture the real geology behind the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus 16. Partway through, the story goes, the first goat died, so a second had to finish the job, which is said to be why the smaller version at Manchester and the larger one at the Lady Lever show different goats. Critics in 1856 were baffled. Time has been kinder, and it now reads as one of the boldest things the Pre-Raphaelites ever produced.

The other four are quieter. Go back to 1851 for "The Hireling Shepherd" (Manchester), a glowing English field where a careless shepherd flirts while his flock strays. It's a parable, really, about negligent spiritual leadership. "The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple" (1854-1860, Birmingham) sent him back to Palestine, both to get Jerusalem right and to paint from local models. In "The Triumph of the Innocents" (1876-1887, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, with another version at Tate) the Holy Family flees into Egypt with the ghosts of Herod's victims trailing behind.

That leaves "The Lady of Shalott." He built it from Tennyson and worked on it across nearly twenty years, until 1905, and it catches the doomed Lady turning from her mirror. This one crossed the Atlantic, and it belongs now to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.

What was William Holman Hunt's religion?

He was an Evangelical Protestant Christian, and a serious one. It wasn't a borrowed theme. It ran straight through the work, which is why so many of the big pictures carry their symbolism out in the open. His strain of faith was a personal one that went directly to Scripture, and moral seriousness came with it. To his mind art had no business being merely decorative. Its job was to put spiritual truth on a wall where people could meet it. (Coming from a wallpaper shop, we'll let that one pass.)

Truth to nature, the Pre-Raphaelite slogan, hardened in his hands into a creed: be faithful to the biblical story down to the last physical fact. Hence the easel on the Dead Sea shore. That conviction kept sending him east, on extended stays through the 1850s and again around 1869 to 1872, to paint biblical scenes from life rather than imagination. He also cared, unusually, about matching sign to fact. Every symbol had to be visible and accurate, so a patient viewer could decode it. None of his fellow founders had quite that ambition.

What was Hunt's family and personal life?

His domestic life was complicated, and a little scandalous by the standards of the day. In 1865 he married Fanny Waugh. He lost her the next year, in Italy, soon after she gave birth to their son, Cyril Benoni Holman Hunt. A decade on he married her sister Edith, and that's where the scandal comes in, because British law forbade marriage to a deceased wife's sister. The couple had to go to Switzerland to wed. At home the marriage wasn't recognized until the Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act of 1907 finally caught up. Edith gave him two more children, Gladys and Hilary.

Before any of that there had been Annie Miller, the best known of his earlier entanglements. She was a model, and in the 1850s he'd hoped to educate her and then marry her (a very Victorian plan). It ended badly. She sat for other painters afterward and married outside the circle. Family kept threading back into the work all the same. The children turn up as models in the late canvases. When his eyesight began to fail, his studio assistant Edward Robert Hughes, Arthur Hughes's nephew, stepped in to help finish several works.

What is William Holman Hunt known for?

Put simply, four things: helping found the Brotherhood, holding to its strict principles across a near-seventy-year career, painting some of the most famous Victorian religious images, and welding detailed realism to Christian meaning. Among the paintings, few images of the era traveled further than "The Light of the World." The social reformer Charles Booth eventually gave his version to Saint Paul's Cathedral, and after that it was reproduced in hundreds of thousands of engravings and prints. It's probably the one you half remember from a church or schoolroom wall.

The writing matters nearly as much as the brush. Between the 1905 memoir and his letters and journals, he left one of the richest primary records of the movement's founding and its long development. Recognition came in the end. King Edward VII awarded him the Order of Merit, and Oxford University was among the institutions that gave him honorary degrees.

When did William Holman Hunt die?

He died on September 7, 1910, at his Kensington home, aged 83. Of the three founders, he was the last one left. He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in the Painters' Corner in the crypt of Saint Paul's, among other major British artists. You'll sometimes read that he's buried in the English Cemetery in Florence. He isn't. That grave is Fanny's, and she died there in 1866. Critics have been rougher on him since than on Millais or Rossetti, because later taste warmed to their work more than to his literal symbolism. His standing as a founder, though, has never seriously been in doubt (nor has the fact that he stayed truest to the cause).

William Holman Hunt questions

What is William Holman Hunt famous for?

He helped found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 and held to its strict principles longer than anyone, and he painted some of the most widely reproduced Victorian religious images. Best known is "The Light of the World," Christ knocking at the door of the human heart, one of the most-seen religious paintings of its century (the original is at Keble College in Oxford).

What was his religion?

He was a devout Evangelical Protestant Christian, and that faith was central to his art. It shows in the explicit symbolism of his biblical subjects, and in his repeated trips to the Holy Land, Palestine and Egypt, to paint scenes from life rather than imagination. Why else would a London painter take a goat to the Dead Sea?

Did he paint "The Scapegoat"?

Yes, between 1854 and 1856, working on the shore of the Dead Sea to capture the real setting behind the Day of Atonement ritual of Leviticus 16. Two versions survive, the larger at the Lady Lever Art Gallery and a smaller one at Manchester. It's one of the most ambitious plein-air works the Pre-Raphaelites attempted, goat and all.