ART.
HOLMAN HUNT'S PAINTING.*
[PRELIMINARY NOTICE.1
IT is peculiarly unfortunate for Mr. Holman Hunt's present reputation that the first collection of his works should be minus three of his most important pictures, and be held in the back room of a Bond Street picture-dealer's. The atmosphere of the shop, is-so-Wholly absent from this painter's pictures, that it is -a-pity it should be present in their surroundings ; nor is this matter improved by a very inadequate catalogue, whose literary merit may be judged from the fact that its author thinks " In Memoriam" to be written in alternately rhyming lines, tells us that the heroine of the "Awakening Conscience" " has her conscience suddenly touched by an accident"! and describes the "Light of the World" as being "a purely mystical picture, less material than a parable, a mere metaphor." Imperfect, the
• 148 New Bond Street.
exhibition must indeed be called, since the two most important religious pictures of this painter's life, the " Finding of the Saviour in the Temple" and the "Triumph of the Innocents," are not included; nor is the magnificent picture of the "After- glow in Egypt," which was shown at the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery.
Still, there are enough pictures left, we speak advisedly, to make the reputation of half-a-dozen ordinary artists. Here is the " Shadow of the Cross," the result of many years' patient work on a housetop in Jerusalem ; here, the even more famous " Light of the World," for a long time bidden from the sight of most of us in the recesses of Keble College ; here is the "Awakening Conscience," which once exercised Mrs. Grundy and her relations so severely, and in defence of which Mr. Raskin wrote his first and most celebrated letter, defending the pre-Raphaelites. Here, too, is " The Scapegoat," the most tragical in its beauty, and the most beautiful in its tragedy, of all modern paintings ; here, the " Claudio and Isabella " and the " Two Gentlemen of Verona," which no one would buy when it was exhibited at the Academy, and which the Times and Saturday Review abused without mercy,—oven suggesting that it was so bad that the Academy might well depart from all accustomed rules, and remove it from their walls, so that it should not disgrace them further. Here is the scene from " The Eve of St. Agnes," the first picture, Hunt thinks, that was ever painted from Keats, though Millais's rendering of the same poem followed hard upon it ; and here, the " Converted Britons assisting Christian Priests to Escape from the Druids," a picture almost identical in its general character with the celebrated " Carpenter's Shop " by the last-named painter. Here, too, most wonderful of all, per- haps, in the strength of its conception and its perfect realisation of the subject, is the " Isabella and the Pot of Basil ;" and here, the two modern-subject pictures of the illuminations on London Bridge on the occasion of the marriage of the Prince of Wales, and the " Ship," with its lighted deck and shadowy sail, and, as Carlyle puts it, " all around it the vast, void night."
These are, perhaps, the chief, and are at all events the most widely known, of Mr. Hunt's works which are here collected, though there are at least a dozen others of great interest. We hope in a future article to give some brief notice of most of these, but for the present intend to confine our remarks to the general characteristics of Mr. Hunt's art, and to pointing out in what respects it differs from that of his contemporaries. For that it does differ, and that not so much from any one special artist, as from all other living English painters, is not to be denied. It is worth while to see clearly what the difference means, for this much is certain, that either one or the other, either Hunt or English Art in general, is wrong ; and it is as well to know which. Two paths iu Art lead, says Ruskin, to the Blessed Mountains, and the Valley of the Dead Sea. Which path is it that Mr. Hunt has chosen ?
To answer this question fully were to go into the whole history of the pre-Raphaelite movement, a matter which for many reasons we shall not attempt. It is possible, however, if not to give a complete answer, at all events to produce some facts upon which our readers can form their own judgment. Leaving out all disputable questions, what is the prevailing characteristic, the leading " note," to use the art slang of to-day, in this painter's work ? The number of the pictures here will almost answer the question. Mr. Hunt has been painting for more than forty years, and the main results of his lifework can be got into one small room. Given that the artist has been, as is notoriously the case, an indefatigable worker during all this period, we can guess how " thorough " has been his execution of each picture; and this is, indeed, the most vital point of his art. Men of more spontaneous artistic impulse we have amongst us ; but for men who have carried that impulse out to a degree equal to Mr. Hunt, we may look in vain. Never, perhaps, in the history of Art were there great pictures with which it was so easy to find fault, and which it was so impossible to d isregard, —pictures whose peculiarities irritated so many, and yet interested all. It is the old story,—if a man has anything to say, he is always worth listening to, and this artist has much that he wants to tell us. Just think for a moment (and in saying this we appeal to those of our readers who have visited this Gallery) of what would be the result if we were to take down every alternate picture, and hang up instead one of the Royal Academicians' works ; say, a landscape by one of the Scotch school, or one of Mr. Morris's fashionably dressed babies ? But yet a " baby" is not necessarily
a piece of affectation, millinery, and absurdity. Look, for instance, at the little head of the "Girl of Fiesole " which hangs here, as beautiful in its simplicity and truth as any of the most important pictures. How would that look as a colour-plate to a weekly newspaper, and how would the printer fare who endeavoured to reproduce its colouring mechanically P It hangs here with no incongruity, this little head of an Italian peasant•girl, by the side of the " Light of the World," and belongs to the same class,—the class of great art. No fashion of to-day, yesterday, or to-morrow could make either of these works, out of date or incomprehensible ; no turgid catalogue is needed to explain either, for the truths upon which they depend— those of emotion, thought, and beauty—are eternal, and common to all mankind. Not to dwell, then, upon this point, we say briefly that the key to Mr. Hunt's art is this thoroughness, this desire, and more than desire, this determination to get to the very heart of his subject—to its very heart of hearts. And this, too, is the reason why no one can pass his work by, and, perhaps, partially the reason, why so many find it unsatisfactory. For the majority of people live in grooves of habit in their visual im- pressions, just as they do in their daily occupations. " He that has eyes to see, let him see,"—but how few people have the eyes ! Accustomed to look but little at Nature, and that little with languid, and for the most part preoccupied, interest, they accept unhesitatingly whatever rendering a painter gives them, so long as it is of the ordinary, conventional kind ; but directly the groove is forsaken, they are forced either to acknowledge, or defend their ignorance; and what defence is so easy as to say oneself is right, and the painter is wrong.
It is a hard saying, but the truth is always offensive, save to the true. People will put up, either in pictures or life, with almost anything that does not come too closely home to them— does not force them to reconsider their conventionalities, either of sight or action. Does any thinking man in England—we ask this question in all seriousness—does any thinking man in England who knows Holman Hunt's work, doubt that he might have been a Royal Academician a dozen times over, if he had only conformed ever so little to their conventional creed. Had he painted babies in white-satin smocks, or old gentlemen in ruffs, or Venetian vagabonds, or Highland cattle, how gladly he would have been welcomed to the Academic ranks, with what ease and security he might have gained a fortune and a baronetcy, and lived in a Kensington palace to the end of his days ! But fancy an Academy rewarding or honouring a man who has simply done his best for his art, who has given every hour of his life to producing great pictures, and neglected to fill his pockets !
Take, lest any one should think these are only vague gener- alities, a little detail. Two years or so ago, half artistic London weS raving about the painting of the draperies of a picture by Mabuse, which was being exhibited at the " Old Masters." Now, in the " Shadow of Death," the blue robe of the Virgin is painted with a perfection which has all the character of clear, brilliant colour, reality, and completeness, of Mabuse's work on twenty times the scale, and possesses, moreover, what Mabuse did not possess, the qualities of denoting its texture, while it lends itself to the lines of the form beneath. Since these Flemish painters, no one has ever painted drapery at all till Mr. Hunt and Rossetti. Take another point, expression. Now, of all the merits of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, this merit of expression was perhaps the chief. Rossetti, Millais, and Hunt all sought it, and all in different ways gained their end. We have no space here to dwell upon the peculiar form it took in Rossetti's art, but we may say briefly that it was more allied to Hunt's than to Millais's work. But as Millais is un- doubtedly peculiarly celebrated in this respect, it is worth while to note the difference between the emotions (and their expres- sion) of his men and women, and those of our present subject. The difference is, in the main, one of sentiment,—sentiment as opposed to passion. A trick (we use the word in no con- temptuous sense) of the eyes and mouth, a pleading expression, which throws the character, as it were, upon one's special protection, and which gives a peculiar softened beauty to the face which he depicts ; this is, briefly speaking, Millais's habitual way of exciting our interest. If we think of his most noted subject-pictures, from the " Huguenot " to the present day, we find this gentle, beautiful pathos always the main point. Some- times we have it tinged with the sentiment of self-sacrifice, as in the " Huguenot ;" sometimes with that of duty, as in the " Black Brunswicker ;" sometimes with that of love, as in the " Proscribed Royalist ;" sometimes with that of reflection, or appeal, or sadness, as the girl considering what her answer should be to her lover's letter, " Yes or No ? " the young wife asking her husband to "Trust Her;" or in the many girl- pictures in which, under various fanciful titles, this artist has given us more of the dreaminess, the bearable sadness, and the unconscious pathos of childhood, than has been set down elsewhere. A question, an appeal, or a regret,—is it not true that every Millais figure-picture is expressive of one of these P Speaking quite clearly, is it not true that it is emotion of the circulating-library kind which we have here, in which sentimentalism is chosen in place of passion, and in which love bears an undue relation to the other affairs of life ? Turn to Hunt's work, and we see the difference at once,—the painter's mind is set in another key ; the emotion does not interest him so long as it is unconnected with thought. The faces of his characters are rarely—we might almost say never— simply loving, trusting, or mournful ; they are instinct with- complicated feelings,—are in process of change from one emotion to another, even as the bodies of his characters are almost in- variably in change from one action to another. For—and this, be it noted, is one of the vital differences between these great painters—Hunt is always successful in painting action, Millais in painting rest.
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