William Holman Hunt – master of allegory and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

William Holman Hunt (born April 2, 1827 – died September 7, 1910) was a British painter of the 19th and early 20th centuries who painted many remarkable paintings on religious themes. He was known as one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The master’s creativity is a reflection of his eternal spiritual search. William Hunt viewed the world as a system of visual signs and believed that the main task of the artist is to identify the relationship between these signs and events. He remained true to his ideals to the end.

Biography

William Hunt was born on April 2, 1827 in London, in the family of a warehouse manager. Named William Hobman Hunt, he later became William Holman Hunt – the clerk wrote down the name incorrectly at the time of the baptism. William decided that this was fate, because he was a devout Christian. William Hunt passionately dreamed of becoming an artist since childhood. Already at the age of 16, he painted portraits to order and made copies of paintings by famous masters.

The young man was able to enter the Royal Academy of Arts in 1844 only on the third attempt – but on his own, without anyone’s patronage. There he became friends with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. With them, in 1848, William founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Frederick Stephens, William Rossetti, James Collinson and Thomas Woolner joined the comrades, forming the sacred seven “brothers”.

Participants in the movement were united by outrage at the outdated canons of art education. In an effort to revive the arts, they emphasized devotion to truth and sought serious, authentic ideas for expression. They ignored established rules, studied nature and tried to portray events as they really were, and not in the spirit of academic traditions. This approach was shaped by the influence of early Renaissance painting, before Raphael and Michelangelo. At the beginning of his career, the young artist was harshly criticized. But the moral maturity of his works and commitment to Christian values helped him gain authority among the Victorian public. The artist loved to paint on canvas primed with tempera. He worked with sable brushes, mixing varnish into oil paints – this gave the colors a special richness.

The Bible was an inexhaustible source of subjects for the painter. Wanting to see with his own eyes the places described in the Old Testament and “to make the history and teachings of Jesus Christ more tangible,” he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the mid-1850s. There the artist worked on the famous “Scapegoat”, painted landscapes and made sketches from life.

In February 1856, Hunt returned to his homeland, hoping for a quick wedding with model Annie Miller. However, the engagement was broken off. In 1865, William married Fanny Waugh – we can see her in the painting “Isabella and the Pot of Basil,” based on the poem by John Keats.

Fanny died in 1866. The widower entrusted his newborn son to the care of his sister-in-law, young Edith. Much later, in 1875, she would become the artist’s second wife. In those days, marriage to a relative of a deceased spouse was considered illegal. A huge scandal followed, relations with Thomas Woolner, who was married to one of Vaugh’s sisters, Alice, deteriorated… In the meantime, in 1866, the grief-stricken artist again went to the Middle East and even built a house in Jerusalem. The local landscapes fascinate him. Here William works on picturesque embodiments of biblical scenes and tirelessly works on sketches for the painting “The Shadow of Death”, sketching the landscapes of Nazareth.

At the end of his life, the painter was practically blind. His assistant, Edward Robert Hughes, helped him complete his last works. William Hunt died on September 7, 1910 and was buried in London, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, next to his favorite brainchild – the life-size painting “Lamp of the World” (1904).