HOLMAN HUNT.THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.FORD MADOX BROWN.Mag. of Art.
PORTRAIT OF HIMSELF.
(By permission of Mr. L. H. Lefèvre, the owner of the copyright.)(By permission of Theodore Watts Dunton, Esq., the owner of the picture.)

All three appeared before the public for the first time in the year 1849. John Millais and Holman Hunt exhibited in the Royal Academy, the one being represented by his “Lorenzo and Isabella,” a subject drawn from Keats, the other by his “Rienzi.” Rossetti had his picture, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” exhibited at the Free Exhibition, afterwards known as the Portland Gallery. All three works excited attention and also derision, and much shaking of heads. The three next works of 1850—“A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary,” by Holman Hunt; “The Child Jesus in the Workshop of Joseph the Carpenter,” by Millais; and “The Annunciation” by Rossetti—were received with the same amused contempt. When they exhibited for the third time—Holman Hunt, a scene from The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Millais, “The Return of the Dove to the Ark” and “The Woodman’s Daughter”—such a storm of excitement broke forth that the pictures had to be removed from the exhibition. A furious article appeared in The Art Journal; the exhibitors, it was said, were certainly young, but they were too old to commit such sins of youth. Even Dickens turned against them in Household Words. The painters who had been assailed made their answer. William Michael Rossetti laid down the principles of the Brotherhood by an article in a periodical called The Critic, and smuggled a second article into The Spectator. In 1850 they founded a monthly magazine for the defence of their theories, The Germ, which on the third number took the title Art and Poetry, and was most charmingly embellished with drawings by Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, and others. Stephens published an essay in it, on the ways and aims of the early Italians, which gave him occasion to discuss the works recently produced in the spirit of simplicity known to these old masters. Madox Brown wrote a paper on historical painting, in which he asserted that the true basis of historical painting must be strict fidelity to the model, to the exclusion of all generalisation and beautifying, and exact antiquarian study of costumes and furniture in contradistinction to the fancy history of the elder painters. But all these articles were written to no purpose. After the fourth number the magazine was stopped, and in these days it has become a curiosity for bibliomaniacs. But support came from another side. Holman Hunt’s picture dealing with a scene from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona received the most trenchant condemnation in The Times. John Ruskin came forward as his champion and replied on 13th May 1851. The Times contained yet a second letter from him on 30th May. And soon afterwards both were issued as a pamphlet, with the title Pre-Raphaelitism, its Principles, and Turner. These works, he said, did not imitate old pictures, but nature; what alienated the public in them was their truth and rightness, which had broken abruptly and successfully with the conventional sweep of lines.

FORD MADOX BROWN.Mag. of Art.
LEAR AND CORDELIA.
(By permission of Albert Wood, Esq., the owner of the picture.)

Holman Hunt is the painter who has been most consistent in clinging throughout his life to these original principles of the Brotherhood. He is distinguished by a depth of thought which at last tends to become entirely elusive, and often a depth of spirit more profound than diver ever plumbed; but at the same time by an angular, gnarled realism which has scarcely its equal in all the European art of the century.

“The Flight of Madeleine and Porphyro,” from Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes, was the first picture, the subject being borrowed in 1848 from his favourite poet. In the work through which he first acknowledged himself a member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood he has given a plain and simple rendering of the scene in the introductory chapter of Bulwer Lytton’s Rienzi. He has chosen the moment when Rienzi, kneeling beside the corpse of his brother, takes a vow of vengeance against the murderer who is riding away. The composition avoids any kind of conventional pyramidal structure. In the foreground every flower is painted and every colour is frankly set beside its neighbour without the traditional gradation. His third picture, “A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary,” is not to be reckoned amongst his best performances. It is forced naïveté, suggesting the old masters, to unite two entirely different scenes upon the same canvas: in the background there are fugitives and pursuers, and a Druid, merely visible by his outstretched arms, inciting the populace to the murder of a missionary; in the foreground a hut open on all sides, which could really offer no protection at all. Yet in this hut a priest is hiding, tended by converted Britons. However, the drawing of the nude bodies is an admirable piece of realism; admirable, also, is the way in which he has expressed the fear of the inmates, and the fanatical bloodthirsty rage of the pursuers, and this without any false heroics, without any rhetoric based upon the traditional language of gesture. The picture from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, with the motto, “Death is a fearful thing, and shamed life a hateful,” is perhaps theatrical in its arrangement, though it is likewise earnest and convincing in psychological expression.

Microscopic fidelity to nature, which formed the first principle in the programme of the Brotherhood, has been carried in Holman Hunt to the highest possible point. Every flower and every ear of corn, every feather and every blade of grass, every fragment of bark on the trees and every muscle, is painted with scrupulous accuracy. The joke made about the pre-Raphaelites has reference to Holman Hunt: it was said that when they had to paint a landscape they used to bring to their studio a blade of grass, a leaf, and a piece of bark, and they multiplied them microscopically so many thousand times until the landscape was finished. His works are a triumph of industry, and for that very reason they are not a pleasure to the eye. A petty, pedantic fidelity to nature injures the total effect, and the hard colours—pungent green, vivid yellow, glaring blue, and glowing red—which Holman Hunt places immediately beside each other, give his pictures something brusque, barbaric, and jarring. But as a reaction against a system of painting by routine, which had become mannered, such truth without all compromise, such painstaking effort at the utmost possible fidelity to nature, was, in its very harshness, of epoch-making significance.

With regard, also, to the transcendental purport of his pictures Holman Hunt is perhaps the most genuine of the group. In the whole history of art there are no religious pictures in which uncompromising naturalism has made so remarkable an alliance with a pietistic depth of ideas. The first, which he sent to the exhibition of 1854, “The Light of the World,” represents Christ wandering through the night in a gold-embroidered mantle, with a lantern in His hand, like a Divine Diogenes seeking men. Taine, who studied the picture impartially without the catalogue, describes it, without further addition, as “Christ by night with a lantern.” But for Holman Hunt the meaning is Christianity illuminating the universe with the mystic light of Faith and seeking admission at the long-closed door of unbelief. It was because of this implicit suggestion that the work made an indescribable sensation in England; it had to go on pilgrimage from town to town, and hundreds of thousands of copies of the engraving were sold. The pietistic feeling of this ascetic preacher was so strong that he was able to venture on pictures like “The Scapegoat” of 1856 without becoming comical.

Cassell & Co.
FORD MADOX BROWN.ROMEO AND JULIET.