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William Henry Hunt, A Fisherboy Leaning on a Rock, c. 1830

A Fisherboy Leaning on a Rock

Tallahassee, Florida, The Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science, Inv. No. 2002.03.12

Watercolor, bodycolor, and gum arabic with scratching out

13 5/8 x 9 11/16 in., 34.6 x 24.6 cm.

Numbered, l.l. 239

 

Provenance:

(S) Foster's, London (P) George Smith;

By descent oto hisson, Murray Smith;

By descent to his daughter, Mrs. Seton Gordon;

(S) Sotheby's London, 20 Nov 1986, Lot 175;

Thomas L. Hicks, M.D., by whom given to the Mary Brogan Museum in 2002

 

 

From 1830 to 1831, Hunt exhibited a series of watercolors showing boys loitering around rocks at Hastings Beach. There were similar versions with one, two, or three boys, each priced according to the number of figures and size of the painting. Single figures were £10 or 12, while the largest of the group, now in the private rooms of the Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle, sussex, was the most expensive at £30. It is dated 1830 and includes three figures. A reduced version of the Norfolk picturen, once in the Bernal Collection and now at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, England, shows just two boys, the younger one held on the shoulders of an older boy. It is now known as Young Salts.

 

This example from that series, now in the Mary Borgan Museum of Art and Science in Tallahassee, Florida, is typical of the single figures set against costal rocks.

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Uploaded on November 28, 2010
Taken on November 28, 2010