Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 22, January, 1873

by Various

First, perhaps, for those readers remote from New England who may never have seen any pictures by this artist, a few words should be said by way of describing some characteristics of his work and the limitations of it; which limitations are rather loudly dwelt upon by connoisseurs and lovers of the popular modern French school. Artists discern these limitations of course more keenly even than others, but their tribute to verity and ideal beauty as represented by this painter is too sincere to allow caviling to find expression. This limitation to which we refer causes Mr. Hunt to allow ideal suggestions, rather than pictures, to pass from his studio, and makes him cowardly before his own work. It recalls in a contrary sense that saying of the sculptor Puget: "The marble trembles before me." Mr. Hunt trembles before his new-born idea. His swift nature has allowed him in the first hour of work to put into his picture the tenderness or rapture, the unconscious grace or tempestuous force, which he despaired at first of ever being able to express. In the flush of success he stops: he has it, the idea; the chief interest of the subject is portrayed before him; the delicate presence (and what can be more delicate than the thoughts he has delineated?) is there, and may vanish if touched in a less fortunate moment. But is this lack of fulfillment in the artist entirely without precedent or parallel? Had not Sir Joshua Reynolds a studio full of young artists who "finished off" his pictures? Were not the very faces themselves painted with such rapidity and want of proper method as to drop off, on occasion, entirely from the canvas, as in case of the boy's head, in being carried through the street? Hunt is of our own age, and would scorn the suggestion of having a hand or a foot painted for him, as if it were a matter of small importance what individual expression a hand or a foot should wear; but who can tell for what future age he has painted the wise, abrupt, kind, persistent, simple, strong old Judge in his Yankee coat; or the genial, resolute, hopeful, self-sacrificing governor of Massachusetts; and the Master of the boys, with his keen, loving, uncompromising face? These are pictures that, when children say, "Tell us about the Governor who helped Massachusetts bring her men first into the field during our war," we may lead them up before and reply, "He was this man!" So also with the portraits of the Judge, of the Master of the boys, of the old man with clear eyes and firm mouth, and that sweet American girl standing, unconscious of observation, plucking at the daisy in her hat and guessing at her fate.

Hurry, impatience and a worship of crude thought are characteristics of our present American life. Hunt is one of us. If these faults mark and mar his work, they show him also to be a child of the time. His quick sympathies are caught by the wayside and somewhat frayed out among his fellows; but nevertheless one essential of a great painter, that of Verity, will be accorded to him after an examination of the pictures we have mentioned.

But truth, character, skill, the many gifts and great labor which must unite to lead an artist to the foot of his shadowy, sun-crowned mountain, can then carry him no step farther unless ideal Beauty join him, and he comprehend her nature and follow to her height. Again we quote from Charles Blanc—for why should we rewrite what he says so ably?—"All the germs of beauty are in Nature, but it belongs to the spirit of man alone to disengage them. When Nature is beautiful, the painter knows that she is beautiful, but Nature knows nothing of it. Thus beauty exists only on the condition of being understood—that is to say, of receiving a second life in the human thought. Art has something else to do than to copy Nature exactly: it must penetrate into the spirit of things, it must evoke the soul of its hero. It can then not only rival Nature, but surpass her. What is indeed the superiority of Nature? It is the life which animates all her forms. But man possesses a treasure which Nature does not possess—thought. Now thought is more than life, for it is life at its highest power, life in its glory. Man can then contest with Nature by manifesting thought in the forms of art, as Nature manifests life in her forms. In this sense the philosopher Hegel was able to say that the creations of art were truer than the phenomena of the physical world and the realities of history."

Now, thought in the soul of the true artist for ever labors to evolve the beautiful. This is what the thought of a picture means to him—how to express beauty, which he finds underlying even the imperfect individual of Nature's decaying birth. To the high insight this is always discernible. None are so fallen that some ray of God's light may not touch them, and this possibility, the faith in light for ever, radiates from the spirit of the artist, and renders him a messenger of joy. No immortal works have bloomed in despondency: they may have taken root in the slime of the earth, but they have blossomed into lilies.

We call this divine power to discern beauty in every manifestation of the Deity, imagination. As it expresses itself in painting, it is so closely allied with what is highest and holiest in our natures that painting has come to be esteemed a Christian art, as contrasted in its development subsequent to the Christian era with the less human works of sculpture. "Christianity came, and instead of physical beauty substituted moral beauty, infinitely preferring the expression of the soul to the perfection of the body. Every man was great in its eyes, not by his perishable members, but by his immortal soul. With this religion begins the reign of painting, which is a more subtle art, more immaterial, than the others—more expressive, and also more individual. We will give some proofs of it. Instead of acting, like architecture and sculpture, upon the three dimensions of heavy matter, painting acts only upon one surface, and produces its effects with an imponderable thing, which is color—that is to say, light. Hegel has said with admirable wisdom: 'In sculpture and architecture forms are rendered visible by exterior light. In painting, on the contrary, matter, obscure in itself, has within itself its internal element, its ideal—light: it draws from itself both clearness and obscurity. Now, unity, the combination of light and dark, is color.' The painter, then, proposes to himself to represent, not bodies with their real thickness, but simply their appearance, their image; but by this means it is the mind which he addresses. Visible but impalpable, and in some sense immaterial, his work does not meet the touch, which is the sight of the body: it only meets the eye, which is the touch of the soul. Painting is then, from this point of view, the essential art of Christianity.... If the painter, like Phidias or Lysippus, had only to portray the types of humanity, the majesty of Jupiter, the strength of Hercules, he might do without the riches of color, and paint in one tone, modified only by light and shade; but the most heroic man among Christians is not a demigod: he is a being profoundly individual, tormented, combating, suffering, and who throughout his real life shares with environing Nature, and receives from every side the reflection of her colors. Sculpture, generalizing, raises itself to the dignity of allegory—painting, individualizing, descends to the familiarity of portraiture."

Let us now return to consider William Hunt's pictures from this second point of view. The gift of Verity having been already assumed, can we also discern that higher power of Imagination whose crown and seal is the Beautiful. To decide this question we have, unhappily, to consider his work as lyrical, rather than dramatic, and for this reason we must study his power under disadvantage. That he possesses dramatic power will hardly be denied by those who know his "Hamlet," "The Drummer-Boy," and "The Boy and the Butterfly;" but the exigencies of life appear to prevent him from occupying himself with compositions such as filled years in the existence of the old painters.

Portraiture being the highest and most difficult labor to which an artist can aspire, to this branch of art Hunt has chiefly confined himself, and from this point of view he must be studied. We do not forget, in saying this, his angel with the flaming torch, strong and beautiful and of unearthly presence, nor the shadowy, half-portrayed figures which dart and flit across his easel; but as we may understand the power of Titian from his portraits, yet never revel in it fully until we look upon "The Presentation" or "The Assumption"—never comprehend the painter's joy or his divine rest in endeavor until the achievement lies before us—we must speak of Hunt only from the work to which he has devoted himself, and not do him the injustice to predict dramas he has never yet composed.

First, pre-eminently appears that worship for moral beauty which suffers him to fear no ugliness. This power allies him with keen sympathy to every living thing. He sees kinship and the immortal spark in each breathing being. The soul of love goes out and paints the dark or the suffering or the repellant faithfully, bringing it in to the light where God's sunshine may fall upon it, and men and women, seeing for the first time, may help to wipe away the stain. This tendency he shares with the great French painter Millet, whom he loves to call Master, and with Dore, whose terrible picture of "The Mountebanks" should call men and women from their homes to penetrate the fastnesses of vice and strive to heal the sorrows of their kind.

This love of moral beauty, which forces painters to paint such pictures, was never in any age more evident. Hunt in his beggar-man, in his forlorn children, and other pictures of the same class, unfolds a beauty that men should be thankful for.

On the other hand, his love of beauty and his power of expressing it should be studied in its direct influence. The beauty of flesh and blood, even the loveliness of children, seems to have slight hold upon him, compared with the significance of character and the lustre with which his imagination endows everything. This lustre is a distinguishing power with him. The depth to which he sees and feels causes him to give higher lights and deeper shadows than other men. White flowers are not only white to him—they shine like stars. His pictures give a sense of splendor.