14b William Henry Hunt, Devotion

Devotion

Manchestre City Art Gallery, No. 1920.639

watercolor and gum arabic heightened with white

18 1/4 X 11 3/4 in., 46.3 X 29.7 cm.

Signed, l.l., W. HUNT

 

This is a typical example of Hunt's watercolors which are characterized as "religious paintings" by the authors of the Country People catalogue. They are not at all religious subjects within the common meaning of the term but instead paintings of persons engaged in one aspect of their lives, praying or involved in a form of religious devotion. Hunt was himself an atheist and painted no watercolors with biblical or other religious narratives as subjects. But he was interested in showing all the activities of common men, which necessarily included many such images of people engaged in their personal religious experiences. Ruskin did not approve of images such as these, and placed them in his second category of Hunt's work. Based on the number of times Hunt painted images of men, women, and children at prayer (and in large part without exactly duplicating any composition) beginning in the 1830s and continuing until late in his career, the artist, despite his own lack of faith, did not share Ruskin's cynical, rather low opinion of such images. Ruskin was correct, however, in observing that images such as the one here are, for better or worse, often more highly finished than other figure paintings by Hunt of similar dates. Hunt, himself, seems to have considered a high degree of finish to have been a positive in determining a value for one of his paintings.

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