He sent the fruit of his efforts to renowned poets, such as Leigh Hunt, and to others who were less well known, such as William Bell Scott, and asked them, after offering great praise for their verses, what they thought of his. He sent them manuscripts of masterpieces of grace and subtlety such as the Blessed Damozel as well as other lesser pieces under the title Songs of the Art Catholic, which made these rationalists and Protestants shudder. Then, with his half blind father he took up a discussion on the Divine Comedy that the old man had interpreted, and with his brother William Michael and his sister Christina, he gave a dissertation on the halo in the Middle Ages. Everyone in the household wrote verses.[5] No-one understood his temperament at all; that of a dilettante passionate about everything, an improviser speaking about everything at once, an anti-papist revolutionary interested in angels and saints, and a painter concerned with rhythm and rhyme. Oddly enough his prestige grew because of it. Gaunt and dark, with a foreign accent and appearance, a rounded forehead and gleaming eyes, his hair falling down to his shoulders, his beard cut in the style of a Neapolitan fisherman, careless in his dress and covered with stains, he seemed infinitely superior to the average artist to the young people studying painting at the Royal Academy. His passion for the picturesque side of things, his disdain for the discoveries of science, the continuous motion of his mind, and his mysticism crossed with a desire to sell his paintings at very high prices must have completely disconcerted even his close friends. He painted, wrote, painted again, rewrote, fell in love with his model, Miss Siddal, hesitating ten years before finally making up his mind to marry her. Then an unexpected event took this beloved woman away from him, and he threw his manuscripts, his most beautiful poems, into her coffin and refused for seven years to dig them up. Changing his mind, he went forward with an appalling and terrible ceremony, had the manuscripts that had been buried with the dead woman disinterred, and earned an excellent profit from them in pounds sterling. Finally, on his deathbed, after an entire life of complete indifference to religion spent in a milieu of freethinkers and adversaries of Romanism, he asked his appalled friends for priest, a confessor...
While Rossetti was copying tobacco boxes in Madox Brown’s studio, one of his classmates at the Royal Academy was making desperate, superhuman efforts to create a place for himself as an independent artist and thus escape from a future in business. His name was William Holman Hunt, and he was twenty-one years of age. His father, a businessman with a small enterprise in the City, had tried everything to dissuade him from his artistic career. But never has fatherly prudence been so obstinately thwarted by destiny. At twelve years old the boy spent his time drawing instead of learning, so he was taken out of school and given a job as a clerk in an auctioneer’s office. One day Hunt’s new employer caught him hiding something in his desk, and insisted on knowing what it was.
Walter Crane,
The Lady of Shalott, 1862.
Oil on canvas, 24.1 x 29.2 cm.
Yale Center for British Art,
Paul Mellon Foundation, New Haven, CT.
He discovered that it was a drawing, and was filled with joy. “It’s good,” he said. “On our first free day, we will shut ourselves in here and spend the day painting.” This lasted for a year and a half, after which the young man was placed in a warehouse run by one of Richard Cobden’s agents. There he met another assistant whose principal task was to draw ornaments for the company’s fabrics. Naturally, the young Hunt helped him with his task and dreamed more than ever of becoming an artist. Meanwhile, he spent his savings taking lessons from a portrait painter who was a student of Reynolds. One day, an old orange merchant came to his warehouse to offer her produce, and Hunt made such a lifelike portrait of her that word of it spread among all the neighbours and reached the ears of the elder Hunt. The son took advantage of these circumstances to declare that he would be a painter and nothing but, and the exhausted father gave in. For a long time, Holman Hunt struggled with poverty, engaging in various sorts of drudgery to try to escape it. He reproduced the paintings of the masters on behalf of other copyists and retouched portraits that no longer pleased their owners, either because they were not lifelike enough, or because they were too lifelike, or because the clothing in them had gone out of style. He failed the entrance examinations for the Royal Academy twice. After a thousand setbacks, threatened with returning to business or going to work in the countryside with his uncle, a farmer, he finally succeeded.
Fortunately, his career had a few good moments here and there. During his time at the Academy, Hunt met a young man two years younger than himself named John Everett Millais, practically a child, who surprised his masters with his marvellous talent. At fifteen, he had already won a medal for his studies of ancient art. Everything seemed to promise him a most brilliant career. The two young men often spoke about the future, about their own, but also about that of English art, which they found had aged poorly. They spoke of the heavy, dreary, blackish colours that they were taught to use in school, comparing them with the light, lively, musical hues used by the great masters of the past and found in nature, and asked themselves how one could substitute the former for the latter. Hunt was struck by something a passer-by had said to him while he was copying Wilkie’s Blind Fiddler at the National Gallery: “You will never achieve the freshness of Wilkie if you paint over brown, grey, or bitumen. If you first cover the canvas with neutral colours, certain ones for the shadows and others for the light, like they teach you to do at the Academy, these backgrounds will eventually come out from under your colours and blacken them. Wilkie painted on a white canvas, without a coloured ground, and finished his painting bit by bit like a fresco.”[6] This advice from the unknown man came at exactly the right time, not because it was excellent in itself, but because it pointed out a heroic remedy. Hunt and Millais both thought about it and, after examining the few Primitive paintings that they saw here and there in the galleries, they began wondering if their eternal freshness came from this straightforward working method, without under-painting and mixing tricks, that the masters before Raphael had imported from fresco painting, where it is unavoidable, into oil painting, where it was later abandoned. In these Primitive masters, where Madox Brown had mostly noticed gestures that were individually created and not learned by rote, poses taken not from a mannequin or the famous figures of masterpieces but from nature, the two young men saw a light, brilliant colour that they set out uncertainly to achieve.
Edmund Blair Leighton,
The Accolade, 1901.
Oil on canvas, 180.9 x 108.5 cm.
Private Collection.
Walter Crane,
La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1865.
Oil on canvas, 46.3 x 56.5 cm.
Private Collection.
John Everett Millais,
A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford, 1857.
Oil on canvas, 124 x 170 cm.
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight.