CHAPTER IX
Some Painters and Poets
I would as soon listen to a lecture on Art as to smell music, or to eat the receipt of a plum pudding.
W. M. Hunt.
William Hunt is the first artist I remember to have known. I have visions of him mounted on a tall hunter, galloping over the Newport beach, and on the Brighton Road, driving a fast trotter in a racing buggy. My clearest early impression, however, is of the day I went with my mother to visit the Hunts at Readville. We were shown into the coach house, a large airy room fragrant of new pine. An easel stood in one corner; opposite was the grand piano; the third corner held a table with a Persian bowl filled with roses; in the fourth, hung saddles and a rack full of riding crops. Mr. Hunt had built his stable before his house, and here the family lived for at least one summer.
Mrs. Hunt, tall and graceful in white muslin, with scarlet flowers in her dark hair, came forward to meet my mother, exclaiming, “My dear friend, how glad I am to see you!” Her voice, deep as an organ note, had a peculiar musical timbre.
Each of the Hunt children occupied a box stall fitted up as a bedroom. They made me welcome and took me to see the farm. It was a hot July day; Mr. Hunt had left his work to lend a hand to the haymakers. He stood on the top of a fragrant load, vigorously pitching hay into the loft. He had thrown off his coat and worked in his shirt sleeves. He wore a soft felt hat and a scarlet sash like an Italian vignajuolo’s. I saw his keen face, with the hawklike aristocratic nose and piercing eyes, through a storm of long gray beard and yellow hay as he worked feverishly, while hardly brighter than his eyes, the big diamond on his finger flashed in the sun.
This must have been soon after the Civil War, for his work at this time breathed the spirit of that struggle. The best of his war pictures is “The Bugler”, a virile figure of a trumpeter on horseback in the dress of the Union army. The handling of the horse recalls Henri Regnault’s “Steeds of Achilles” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Another of Hunt’s popular war pictures was “The Drummer Boy”, a lad with torn shirt and bare legs, rolling out with his drumsticks the call,
“To arms, Freemen!”
A pretty sketch of the artist’s little girls playing “hospital nurses” was a prime favorite of mine. In the dining room at Oak Glen hang signed lithographs of “The Bugler”, “The Violet Seller”, and “The Woman at the Fountain.” Hunt himself made these faithful reproductions.
Years later I saw Hunt’s masterpieces, “The Discoverer” and “The Flight of Night”, in the Albany State Capitol before they were destroyed by the settling of the foundations. The designs fortunately are preserved, but not a vestige remains of the two magnificent frescoes that once glowed in the spaces above the windows of the Senate Chamber.