Background
William Holman Hunt was born on April 2, 1827 in Cheapside, London, England, United Kingdom, the son of a warehouse manager.
William Holman Hunt was born on April 2, 1827 in Cheapside, London, England, United Kingdom, the son of a warehouse manager.
When William Holman Hunt was between seventeen and eighteen, in 1844, he entered the Royal Academy art schools, where he soon made acquaintance with his lifelong friend John Everett Millais, then a boy of fifteen.
Hunt 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.
Hunt was passionately determined to ensure absolute truth to nature in the rendering of his subjects. He painted most of the "Light of the World outside by moonlight", and the "Scapegoat" (1854) was painted beside the Dead Sea on the first of Hunt's many journeys to the Holy Land in search of authentic settings for his biblical scenes.
After about 1860 Hunt was acknowledged as a leading English painter, but he became increasingly isolated from contemporary trends by his long absences abroad and his continuing adherence to the ideals and realistic technique of the Pre-Raphaelite style.
Following Rossetti's death in 1882, Hunt began a vigorous defense of these ideals and of his role in their formation with a series of articles which culminated in his remarkable autobiography (1905-1906). Although Hunt was obsessed throughout his life with light and its effect on color, his popularity was to a large extent founded on his vivid religious imagery, which received wide circulation in the form of engravings.
Hunt eventually had to relinquish painting because failing eyesight meant that he could not achieve the quality that he wanted. His last major works, including a large version of "The Light of the World", were completed with the help of his assistant, Edward Robert Hughes.
William Holman Hunt died on September 7, 1910 in Kensington, London, England, United Kingdom. He was buried in St Paul's Cathedral in London, England.
Isabella and the Pot of Basil
The Lantern Maker's Courtship
Morning Hunt
Distant View of Nazareth
Self-Portrait
Bianca
My Son Cyril
Christ and the two Marys
Amaryllis
Our English Coasts
1852Stephen Lushington
The Schoolgirl's Hymn
The Sphinx at Gizeh
Cornfield at Ewell
1849Valentine Rescuing Silvia from Proteus
1851Portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
1853The Eve of Saint Agnes
British artist William Holman Hunt
The Light of the World
1851The Importunate Neighbour
Asparagus Island
Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother, Slain in a Skirmish between the Colonna and Orsini Factions
The Lady of Shalott
The Shadow of Death
Robert Braithwaite Martineau
The Ponte Vecchio, Florence
Self-Portrait
1845London Bridge on the Night of the Marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales
The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple
The Lady of Shalott
Portrait of William Pink
Cyril Benoni Holman Hunt
Fairlight Downs, Sunlight on the Sea
The Awakening Conscience
1853The Scapegoat
The Birthday (A Portrait Of The Artist's Wife, Edith)
May Morning on Magdalen College Tower, Oxford
The Triumph of the Innocents
1876Claudio and Isabella
1850John Ruskin's dead chick
Fishingboats by Moonlight
The Dead Sea from Siloam
The Festival of St. Swithin or The Dovecote
The Afterglow in Egypt, 19th century
The Scapegoat
Portrait of Fanny Holman Hunt
The Eve of St. Agnes
Portrait of John Everett Millais
1853Lady Fairbairn with her Children
The Hireling Shepherd
A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Priest from the Persecution of the Druids
Afterglow in Egypt
William Holman Hunt changed his surname from "Hobman Hunt" to Holman Hunt when he discovered that a clerk had misspelled the name after his baptism at the Anglican church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Ewell, England.
William Holman Hunt was one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Hunt married twice. After a failed engagement to his model Annie Miller, he married Fanny Waugh in 1865.
Within a year, after the birth of their son Cyril Holman Hunt, his wife Fanny died in Italy. Hunt sculpted her tomb at Fiesole, having it brought down to the English Cemetery in Florence.
In 1873 he married Edith Waugh, his first wife's sister. At the time it was illegal in the United Kingdom to marry one's deceased wife's sister, so Hunt travelled abroad to marry her. The couple had a son, Hilary Lushington Holman Hunt, and a daughter, Gladys Holman Hunt.