William Henry Hunt, The Barber, signed and exhibited 1837

The Barber

Watercolor and bodycolor with scratching out

Signed W. Hunt and indistinctly dated 1837, lower right

18 1/8 X 12 inches, 46.4 X 31.8 cm.

 

Provenance:

Bought by Lady Rolle at the 1837 Spring Exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water-colours

Descended through the family of Lady Rolle until (s) Sotheby's Bearne, Torquay, 23 July 1978, lot 257 (p) £840 Fosse Gallery (dealer)

(s) Christie's London, 8 June 1999, Lot 99 (p) £8,625, $14,342 Carolyn Gee (dealer)

 

Exhibited:

London, Society of Painters in Water-colours, Spring Exhibition, 1837, no. 251

Wolverhampton, Preston, and Hastings, England, William Henry Hunt, 1981, no. 124

 

Literature:

H.M Cundall, English Painters of the Victorian Era, 1877, illustrated facing p. 50

H. J. Wilmont-Buxton, English Painters, 1883, p. 112

 

Engraved;

C. Turner, wood engraving for Mr. S.C. Turner, 1841, Dedicated to Lady Rolle.

Thomas Fairland for Hunt's Comic Sketches, 1847.

 

 

This is a good example of the type of humorous genre painting by Hunt which the public loved (thanks to their appearance at the annual watercolor exhibition year after year and the number of engravings made for popular consumption), but which some contemporaryart critics disdained. Even in his own time, Hunt's reputation as a serious artist, which he clearly was, suffered due to some of his less-than-serious boy paintings - the term "Hunt boys" became synonymous with the humorous pictures, not the very large number of straightforward pictures with boy models., such as Too Hot! and The Eavesdropper.

 

Even Ruskin, who otherwise was Hunt's biggest cheerleader, showed his dislike for these watercolors by choosing a special category for them in his catalogue of the 1879-80 exhibiton of Hunt and Prout which he organized. In Ruskin's words:

 

CLASS 3

Country Life with some expression of its degradation , either by gluttony, cowardice, or rudeness, The drawings in this class are usually very clever, [sic ... I wish my 9th grade English teacher could see me now, correcting Ruskin's use of a comma!] and apt to be very popular; but, they are, on the whole, dishonourable to the artist.

 

Even if the critics thought them undignified, much of Hunt's fame and income during his early years exhibiting as a full member of the watercolor society came from painting these "comic" subjects.. When a volume of engravings after Hunt's watercolors was published in 1844, bore the title, Hunt's Comic Sketches, apparently as some sort of selling point, since most of the images included in the book were not the slightest bit funny. Yet by the 1840s, when Hunt began to phase out figure paintings and to concentrate on still life watercolors, his reputation was still based primarily on his clever and at times outrageously humorous pictures of boys, especially those for which John swain had modeled. And these paintings continued to obtain the highest prices at auction until the early 20th century.

 

In the Barber, exhibited by Hunt in 1837, John assumes one of his least attractive visages and stands, with nervous, curved fingers and pursed lips, as he gets a haircut. He certainly needed one by all appearances. In 1842, Hunt exhibited Preparing for the Soiree, which, if not for its considerably larger size, could have been a female pendant to this picture. It shows a girl seated in front of a bath tub which, with its soapy water, has clearly just been used. She still wears her heavy black, everyday shoes, but her stylish slippers are on the floor waiting for her use. Her mother, or perhaps a maid, lords over the girl with a pair of tongs which are being used to curl the girls hair, much to her horror. In less than a decade, Hunt had gone from the refined images of young femininity to images which might be used as evidence of child abuse, and all for a laugh and a few bucks (or should I say quid?). While most of his paintings of children continued to show little or no attempts at humor, the few which are truly comic in nature typically garnered the most, and often most favorable, comment from contemporary art critics. Due to the artist's choice of timeless childhood activities and the truth of his subject's reactions, the truly comic images are still easy for modern viewers to fully appreciate

 

At times, Hunt would include pictures or prints in the backgrounds of his figure paintings which reflected the subject matter in some way. Here we see on the wall behind the boy a print of after a painting by Anthony Van Dyck which shows Samson being paraded before Delilah after she had shorn his hair, an obvious reference to the boy's being forced to have a haircut.

 

Done