BOOKS

Truth is ugliness

Colin Welch

WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT: THE TRUE PRE-RAPHAELITE by Anne Clark Amor

Constable, f16.95, pp.301

How did Ruskin manage equally to admire both Turner, atmospheric and in- substantial almost to the point of dissolu- tion, and Holman Hunt, detailed to the point of obsession and self-defeat? It has always perplexed me. 1 would have ex- pected Ruskin to dismiss the later Turner as he dismissed Whistler — a pot of paint thrown in the public's face. Holman Hunt, as this fascinating book reveals, shared my perplexity. He was astonished that Ruskin, in view of his admiration for Turner, should draw so well. He plainly regarded Turner as a bad draughtsman and a bad example. Some of his drawings did please Hunt, but not much. They would pall in a fortnight. Hunt accuses Turner of having `forgotten the necessity for the constituent ugliness (my italics) in works of Art: all abruptnesses are softened or removed ....' In one instance, to Hunt's shocked dismay, Turner had actually removed a mountain from a picture of a named town, and Turner's mists annoyed him `so much'.

In such criticisms Hunt's own artistic persona is made clear: his literal-minded truthfulness and faithfulness to nature minutely examined, his passion for detail and precision, his taste for abrupt and jarring juxtapositions, his veneration for `ugliness' as an essential part of truth and thus of beauty. Quite in character was his determination to paint and finish all his pictures on the spot, no matter the difficul- ties and even, in the Holy Land, dangers. The moment you leave nature for the studio, he told a disciple, you tend to remove or confuse awkward bits of reality. In the presence of nature, 'the simplifica- tion is done by adding' (my italics again). Add, add, add, more and more — no wonder his pictures were so late in arriv- ing.

Some of his paintings are reproduced in this book — not enough, not enough in colour, not big enough, none easy to find for reference. No one glancing through these, perhaps with some of the originals in mind, would accuse Hunt of missing out the essential ugliness. Only the magical `May Morning on Magdalen Tower' has any instant uncontroversial charm, that and 'The Hireling Shepherd' and an asto- nishing self-portrait aged 14.

And the trouble he took to make sure all the ugliness was there on the canvas in all its monstrous complexity and glaring tech- nicolor! 'The Scapegoat', for instance. Ford Madox Brown justly said that it had `to be seen to be believed'. Only so could it be understood how 'the might of genius' could make 'out of an old goat and some saline incrustations' a most 'tragic' work of art. Scoffers might be tempted to substitute `comic' or 'horrific' or 'macabre' for 'tra- gic'. But even they will not withhold respect from the man who, to paint this and other startling masterpieces, travelled repeatedly to the Middle East, troubled then as now, or more so, a Middle East which he, extremely insular, half hated. He found the Arabs 'the meanest sneaks in the world', fully deserving to lose their empire, and detested their 'hideous domes and minarets'. He risked death by disease and bandits, one band of which he fought off with fists and fire-arms, rounding them up single-handed and marching them off to the British consulate and jail.

In order to get the donkey absolutely right anatomically in The Triumph of the Innocents', Hunt boiled down a whole horse (he couldn't get a donkey) to get at the skeleton. The stench was appalling for several days. Neighbours complained and called the police. All was fairly pointless, since the donkey in the picture is largely hidden by the Innocents anyway.

This grisly tale was told before by Diana Holman-Hunt in her My Grandmothers and I. This enthralling and richly amusing book was memorable among much else for a marvellous snap of the old painter and his wife (one of the grandmothers) togged up for a royal garden party, he shuffling along, bent and whiskery under a grey top hat, she towering at his side, staring haughtily downwards through a corded pince-nez, decked out like a Christmas tree under an amazing bonnet and innumerable shawls, wraps, reticules, parasols, feathers, gewgaws and what look like long embroi- dered silk bell-pulls. She is described in the present book as turning up at the formal presentation of `The Light of the World' to St Paul's Cathedral in 'an eye-catching outfit'. This I can believe.

As the sister of Hunt's first wife, who died tragically young, she was not in those days in this country permitted to marry him. A white wedding took place in Switzerland, but some friends cut them and their children were for a long time re- garded as illegitimate. Despite Mrs Hunt's becoming 'somewhat eccentric', their mar- riage was an unending honeymoon: `they were like happy children who walked hand in hand through the world, even when they reached old age'.

Diana Holman-Hunt helped with this book, and contributes an invaluable if sometimes confusing and dissenting intro- duction. Hunt, she says, 'has become Clark Amor's hero'. She seems slightly to dis- approve. I find Clark Amor's veneration for the old boy very understandable, and productive of no more harm than a gener- ous tendency to dismiss all criticism of Hunt's and his friends' work as 'unjusti- fied', though some of it strikes me as pretty near the mark. After all, objectively mea- sured, Hunt was heroic — brave, diligent beyond belief, undaunted by difficulties, many of his own creation, generous with help and money, tall, handsome, irresisti- ble to men and women alike. The author quotes abundant contemporary and con- vincing testimony to his extraordinary charm. His talk was 'delightful': he was `one of the fullest of men', 'loyal and helpful', `the whole expression sunny and full of simple boyish happiness', frank and open, unspoilt, very ready to laugh, though more perhaps out of high spirits than from any profound sense of humour.

More humour might have protected him as a painter from some solemnly ludicrous lapses of taste. It might have warned him that it would not be easy to pick up a dirty, verminous and foul-mouthed though beautiful slut and transform her by earnest instruction into an ideal bride (she appears in 'The Awakening Conscience' and ran off with the cousin of her noble lover, presum- ably less choosy than Hunt, for they lived happily ever after). Humour might have modified hopes that the exhibition of 'The Light of the World' in South Africa would chasten the disaffected Boers. Hunt did paint one 'satiric' picture, Hogarthian as he thought it, 'The Miracle of the Holy Fire', mocking not religion but the priesthood he despised: a hideous muddle, and few can have got the point.

'Holy Hunt', as he became, sounds an austere and forbidding figure. In fact his life was full of fun. The girl in 'The Hireling Shepherd' was engaged to an absent sailor. Hunt's irreverent friends hammered ceaselessly at his door, pretend- ing to be the fiancé suddenly returned in wrath. He once received an anonymous note revealing that in his absence his servants had been living it up with larky guests of both sexes. His reaction was relaxed indeed: he felt only that it was 'rather hard that I should be debarred from the fun'. He adored parties, was not averse to gossip, admired Carlyle without over- looking 'a shade of rickety joylessness'.

Hardly less heroic than Hunt was that forbidden second wife Edith, née Waugh (yes, some relation). Tough and absolutely devoted, she accompanied her husband to the Middle East, sharing all his hardships and dangers, even when pregnant. How on earth was she arrayed?- The perils those Victorian ladies faced, in India as in Palestine, the layers upon layers of clothes in which they faced them! The author only chides Mrs Hunt gently for her tremendous influence over Hunt, 'not always for the better'. 'She lacked his grand nobility of spirit', diluted 'that generosity of spirit' he had displayed when young, issued 'dogma- tic pronouncements' on everything that touched their lives, 'wore him down'.

The Pre-Raphaelites, incidentally, are often called literary painters. As a friendly critic put it at the time, their 'pictures should at least mean something... [should] express thought, feeling or purpose'. Liter- ary values could easily use such sentiments to infiltrate into painting, scandalising some purists but not, I confess, me. Hol- man Hunt and other Pre-Raphaelites, however, were literary painters in quite another sense. Self-educated, Hunt was said by Lear to be able to quote the whole of Tennyson from memory. Much of his descriptive prose, moreover, quoted in this book, is amazingly vivid and evocative. A wonderful observer, nothing escaped his attention or defied his power to reproduce it not only in paint but in words and, in the latter case, with better or even impeccable taste. A mistaken vocation? Well, any who thinks so would have to be prepared to sacrifice much passionate feeling and some beauty.