A Graduate of Pomona
William Henry Hunt, Still Life with a Barrel and Vessels (c. 1830)
To be fair to one of the great English watercolor painters, the previous watercolors by William henry Hunt are not very typical of his paintings of still life (although some might consider them much more interesting and revealing about the man who painted them). This is a very fine example of an early still life by Hunt, painted at a time when the artist was seeking to compete with artists working with oil paint by depicting in watercolor very solid, volumetric images of common objects. He achieved these remarkable depictions of various textures and types of materials by using small, stippled brush strokes, subtilely simulating the way light reveals the form and color of objects by the nature of the surface illuminated, the angle at which light strikes, and the reflections of light from surrounding objects. I would venture to guess that this is not the type of picture the vast majority of viewers would expect from an artist working in watercolor. Hunt's contemporaries must have been similarly surprised when Hunt began to display these watercolors which, to say the least, must have stood out from all the other works hanging nearby, with their ink outlines and washes of pale, transparent color.
It has become popular, it seems, to compare still lifes by Hunt from this period with the many still life paintings in oil by the French painter, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779), an artist who worked several generations earlier. The comparison, unlike so many made by art critics, is probably fair, since it was Hunt's explicit goal to compete with those artists whose large paintings in oil dominated the Royal Academy exhibitions, much to the detriment of those small, pale, watercolors which, before the formation of watercolor societies with their own exhibitions, were lost on the same picture plastered walls. It would be too much to say that Hunt succeeded to the degree that one of his watercolors could hang comfortably along side a large Chardin still life. Hunt would undoubtedly have been thrilled to be considered in comparisons have even been made... maybe almost as much as Chardin would have been rather happier had he profited as much from his talents as did the extremely successful Hunt. But, much more importantly, through his desire to show formerly unrecognized uses of the watercolor medium, Hunt almost single handedly transformed English watercolor paintings from what it had been before he came on to the scene, an almost gentile art form best viewed by one person at close range, into the beginnings of mainstream Victorian art.
Hunt's role in that transition in the use of watercolor, for better or worse, should at least be recognized, much as his innovative techniques, his use of color, and the possible influence of his methods on French Impressionism should also be explored much more thoroughly.
William Henry Hunt, Still Life with a Barrel and Vessels (c. 1830)
To be fair to one of the great English watercolor painters, the previous watercolors by William henry Hunt are not very typical of his paintings of still life (although some might consider them much more interesting and revealing about the man who painted them). This is a very fine example of an early still life by Hunt, painted at a time when the artist was seeking to compete with artists working with oil paint by depicting in watercolor very solid, volumetric images of common objects. He achieved these remarkable depictions of various textures and types of materials by using small, stippled brush strokes, subtilely simulating the way light reveals the form and color of objects by the nature of the surface illuminated, the angle at which light strikes, and the reflections of light from surrounding objects. I would venture to guess that this is not the type of picture the vast majority of viewers would expect from an artist working in watercolor. Hunt's contemporaries must have been similarly surprised when Hunt began to display these watercolors which, to say the least, must have stood out from all the other works hanging nearby, with their ink outlines and washes of pale, transparent color.
It has become popular, it seems, to compare still lifes by Hunt from this period with the many still life paintings in oil by the French painter, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779), an artist who worked several generations earlier. The comparison, unlike so many made by art critics, is probably fair, since it was Hunt's explicit goal to compete with those artists whose large paintings in oil dominated the Royal Academy exhibitions, much to the detriment of those small, pale, watercolors which, before the formation of watercolor societies with their own exhibitions, were lost on the same picture plastered walls. It would be too much to say that Hunt succeeded to the degree that one of his watercolors could hang comfortably along side a large Chardin still life. Hunt would undoubtedly have been thrilled to be considered in comparisons have even been made... maybe almost as much as Chardin would have been rather happier had he profited as much from his talents as did the extremely successful Hunt. But, much more importantly, through his desire to show formerly unrecognized uses of the watercolor medium, Hunt almost single handedly transformed English watercolor paintings from what it had been before he came on to the scene, an almost gentile art form best viewed by one person at close range, into the beginnings of mainstream Victorian art.
Hunt's role in that transition in the use of watercolor, for better or worse, should at least be recognized, much as his innovative techniques, his use of color, and the possible influence of his methods on French Impressionism should also be explored much more thoroughly.