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O ne senses that in recent times collectors have rather neglected William Henry Hunt, the technically brilliant 19th century painter who achieved so much success within his lifetime. Ahead of the upcoming Old Master & British Works on Paper sale, Mark Griffith-Jones, Sotheby’s British Watercolours and Drawings Department’s Director and Specialist, asks if it not time for a correction in the market.
Featured artworks by William Henry Hunt
Beginning life as a protégé of Dr Thomas Monro and a pupil of John Varley, William Henry Hunt – who only measured five feet tall – embarked on a career that would not only earn him financial security, but the respect of his fellow artists and much high praise from London’s fiercest art critics.
John Ruskin hung Hunt’s work (alongside his favorite Turners) in his bedroom and he was to describe him as one of the leading exponents of English naturalism, while William Makepeace Thackeray quipped that if he were the Duke of Devonshire, he would have a ‘couple of Hunts in every room in all my houses.’1
In the 20th century, Cyril and Shirley Fry were also passionate about the artist, championing him by organizing two major exhibitions at their gallery in 1967 and 1981 and putting together, for their personal collection, a group of remarkable landscapes, seascapes, interiors, portraits and still-lives, that demonstrate both his artistic diversity and the full extent of his remarkable talents.
Looking closely at these works today, it is hard not to marvel at Hunt’s extraordinary ability to represent a myriad of different textures and surfaces. His treatment of the pearl-like interior of an oyster, or the dusty terracotta tiles of a rustic kitchen floor, or even the white-hot coals of a smouldering cooking fire are, for example quite spellbinding.
All this is achieved through the mastery of a painting technique that saw his image emerge from the careful build-up of layer upon layer of tiny touches of colour – a method that would become familiar to the French impressionists.
In 1862, aged 72, Hunt is recorded as saying ‘it is never too late to try and do better’.2 It is this line that perhaps best sums up this dedicated, popular and brilliant master.
For works by William Henry Hunt from the Fry Collection, please see lots 215 to 223 in Old Master & British Work on Paper and lot 12 in the sale, ‘A Fine Line: Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries’ (7th July).
1. Sir John Witt, William Henry Hunt (1790-1864), Life and Work, with a Catalogue, London 1982, p. 26
2. Witt, op. cit., p. 59
