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.

Sir Frank Dicksee, Chivalry, c. 1885.

Oil on canvas, 183 x 136 cm.

The FORBES Magazine Collection, New York.

Besides aesthetic discussions, Holman Hunt’s other great pleasure was reading. Poets, historians, philosophers and scholars, he devoured everything that came into his hands. Like Flandrin, he trained his mind and his eye at the same time, and after painting all day long, he read all through the night. One evening, one of his studio companions brought him a book by an Oxford graduate that had only recently appeared but was constantly being reprinted: The Modern Painters. Holman Hunt leafed through the book, first with curiosity, then with admiration, and finally with enthusiasm. This was not one of those volumes of vague, idle chatter that one is accustomed to categorising as aesthetics, a discussion about art by one of those literary renegades who write badly and do not draw at all. It was a swift plea, eloquent and passionate, in favour of naturalist landscapes and rejecting composed academic ones. It was a glittering study full of facts and examples where one sensed the experience of a practising artist behind each theory, a dissertation where one felt that every stroke of the pen had been preceded by a stroke of the brush. And it was also beautifully written, employing the richest, strongest and most concise language that could be imagined. Hunt was captivated. These pages were written by a stranger, but nonetheless seemed to have been created specifically for him, for they expressed so clearly the very things he felt vaguely in his soul. So he spent the night hunched over the book, reading. What then? This, for example: “And it ought to be a rule with every painter, never to let a picture leave his easel while it is yet capable of improvement, or of having more thought put into it. The general effect is often perfect and pleasing, and not to be improved upon, when the details and facts are altogether imperfect and unsatisfactory. It may be difficult, perhaps the most difficult task of art, to complete these details, and not to hurt the general effect; but, until the artist can do this, his art is imperfect and his picture unfinished. That only is a complete picture which has both the general wholeness and effect of nature, and the inexhaustible perfection of nature’s details. And it is only in the effort to unite these that a painter really improves. By aiming only at details, he becomes a mechanic; by aiming only at generals, he becomes a trickster; his fall in both cases is sure.”[7]

The author also said: “Now it is, indeed, impossible for the painter to follow all this; he cannot come up to the same degree and order of infinity, but he can give us a lesser kind of infinity. He has not one-thousandth part of the space to occupy which nature has; but he can, at least, leave no part of that space vacant and unprofitable. If nature carries out her minutiae over miles, he has no excuse for generalising in inches. And if he will only give us all he can, if he will give us a fullness as complete and as mysterious as nature’s, we will pardon him for its being the fullness of a cup instead of an ocean. But we will not pardon him, if, because he has not the mile to occupy, he will not occupy the inch, and because he has fewer means at his command, will leave half of those in his power unexerted. Still less will we pardon him for mistaking the sport of nature for her labour, and for following her only in her hour of rest, without observing how she has worked for it. After spending centuries in raising the forest, and guiding the river, and modelling the mountain, she exults over her work in buoyancy of spirit, with playful sunbeam and flying cloud; but the painter must go through the same labour, or he must not have the same recreation. Let him chisel his rock faithfully, and tuft his forest delicately, and then we will allow him his freaks of light and shade, and thank him for them; but we will not be put off with the play before the lesson, with the adjunct instead of the essence, with the illustration instead of the fact.”[8]

Edward Burne-Jones,

The Perseus Series: The Rock of Doom, c. 1884-1885.

Gouache on paper, 154 x 128.6 cm.

Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton.

Edward Burne-Jones,

The Perseus Series: Perseus and the Sea Nymphs

 (The Armament of Perseus), 1877.

Gouache on paper, 152.8 x 126.4 cm.

Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton.

The young painter read the book from cover to cover, hoping that before falling asleep he would find what he had been seeking for so long; a call to arms against academic generalisation and a superior model that could be opposed to the academic models. Finally, he came upon this page, the last in the volume and, at the time, the most audacious that had ever been written: “From young artists nothing ought to be tolerated but simple bona fide imitation of nature. They have no business to ape the execution of masters; to utter weak and disjointed repetitions of other men’s words, and mimic the gestures of the preacher without understanding his meaning or sharing in his emotions. We do not want their crude ideas of composition, their unformed conceptions of the Beautiful, their unsystematised experiments upon the Sublime. We scorn their velocity, for it is without direction; we reject their decision, for it is without grounds; we re-probate their choice, for it is without comparison. Their duty is neither to choose, nor compose, nor imagine, nor experimentalise; but to be humble and earnest in following the steps of nature, and tracing the finger of God. Nothing is so bad a symptom in the work of young artists as too much dexterity of handling, for it is a sign that they are satisfied with their work and have tried to do nothing more than they were able to do. Their work should be full of failures, for these are the signs of efforts. They should keep to quiet colours, greys and browns; and making the early works of Turner their example, as his latest are to be their object of emulation, should go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth.”[9] The call to arms had been found.

Who, then, was the writer who, on this page written in 1843, gave the precise formula for realism well before the realists, at the time when Courbet and those like him were still children or barely out of school, still struggling to find their way? He, too, was almost a child. He had written this book when he was but twenty-three years old in a small house in Herne Hill, in the Surrey hills outside London. He had spent several years travelling with his parents in Italy and along the banks of the Rhine in Switzerland, amassing documents, copying paintings, studying leaves and flowers under a microscope, running through the museums and mountains with pencil in hand, sketching the mouldings of a cornice or the grand lines of a glacier. Then, determined to express his admiration for Turner and praise this great artist, he made use of all of his observations and all these examples, and cried out to a stupefied England that nothing in the world was more beautiful than nature and art, and that a great people that expressed itself could became artists whenever they wanted. The product of all this was the first volume of Modern Painters. Then, over the next five years, he wrote those prodigious evocations of human monuments and divine things, of ancient thought and vanished inspiration: The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, Aratra Pentelici, The Val d’Arno, Sesame and Lilies, The Queen of the Air, The Eagle’s Nest, Ariadne Florentina, Mornings in Florence, and Laws of Fesole.