A Graduate of Pomona
William Henry Hunt, The Expecant, exhibited 1848
The Expectant
Private collection
Watercolor and bodycolor with scratching out
16 1/2 X 11 1/4 in., 42 X 28.5 cm
signed, l.r., W. Hunt
Provenance:
(S) 1848, Society of Painters in Water-colours, Spring Exhibition, 15 gns. to John Curteis, 39 Devonshire Place, London, England;
The Blair Collection, Platt Hall, Manchester, until 1946;
Donated to the Manchester City Art Gallery as part of the huge Platt collection;
(S) Sotheby's London, 3 April 1996, Lot 196 (as The Anxious Wait) (P) £7,500*, $11,447 by the present owner.
Literature:
The Spectator, 6 May 1848, p. 447
This is a later version of William Henry Hunt;s watercolor commonly known as Love's Missive. It is almost twice as large as the original version, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum. In form it varies from the earlier watercolor only in a few minor details. But Hunt had even more techniques at his disposal by the time he painted the dress worn by the woman here, with light shimmering as it dances over the more reflective bands of pink in the material. There is a much greater sense of depth, even in this confined space, which makes the Victoria & Albert version look rather lifeless and flat in comparison. And, if anything, the amazing imitation of light streaming in through the pulled back curtain, along with the astonishing depiction of the way light strikes glass and the layers of depth receding all the way to the buildings and sky revealed beyond is even more accomplished than the marvelous depiction of a much larger curtained window in Rehearsing the Lesson (also exhibited in 1948). Overall, Hunt shows much more assurance and ease when painting the identical subject he had depicted about two decades earlier.
Described in the 1848 Spectator review as follows:
No other painter could have painted a young lady, like one in another picture, in a staring stiff clean dress of muslim with a pink pattern peeping out of a window between the white curtain; no other painter could have made both form and colour stand out with all the direct force of reality, the hard uncompromising lines and unflinchingly asserted pattern, and have made it attempt to modify the effect by pictorial chiaroscuro; but there is -- of the hightest kind -- that of Nature herself: it is the wonderfully acute sense of colour, with its endless variety of gradations of tint, that enables Hunt thus to transfer unadulterated distinctness of sunlight to the delicate and fragile forms of the primrose -- to catch in all their threadlike delicacy the stamina of the May blossoms. It is to be obserbed of this artist, that the colours, however vivid, do not look as if they were laid on from the palette, but as if they glowed from the object itself that he depicts -- it is not the red or green or blue from the colourman's that you recognize, but the red of the flower or green of the egg -- real primrose colour or plum colour.
William Henry Hunt, The Expecant, exhibited 1848
The Expectant
Private collection
Watercolor and bodycolor with scratching out
16 1/2 X 11 1/4 in., 42 X 28.5 cm
signed, l.r., W. Hunt
Provenance:
(S) 1848, Society of Painters in Water-colours, Spring Exhibition, 15 gns. to John Curteis, 39 Devonshire Place, London, England;
The Blair Collection, Platt Hall, Manchester, until 1946;
Donated to the Manchester City Art Gallery as part of the huge Platt collection;
(S) Sotheby's London, 3 April 1996, Lot 196 (as The Anxious Wait) (P) £7,500*, $11,447 by the present owner.
Literature:
The Spectator, 6 May 1848, p. 447
This is a later version of William Henry Hunt;s watercolor commonly known as Love's Missive. It is almost twice as large as the original version, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum. In form it varies from the earlier watercolor only in a few minor details. But Hunt had even more techniques at his disposal by the time he painted the dress worn by the woman here, with light shimmering as it dances over the more reflective bands of pink in the material. There is a much greater sense of depth, even in this confined space, which makes the Victoria & Albert version look rather lifeless and flat in comparison. And, if anything, the amazing imitation of light streaming in through the pulled back curtain, along with the astonishing depiction of the way light strikes glass and the layers of depth receding all the way to the buildings and sky revealed beyond is even more accomplished than the marvelous depiction of a much larger curtained window in Rehearsing the Lesson (also exhibited in 1948). Overall, Hunt shows much more assurance and ease when painting the identical subject he had depicted about two decades earlier.
Described in the 1848 Spectator review as follows:
No other painter could have painted a young lady, like one in another picture, in a staring stiff clean dress of muslim with a pink pattern peeping out of a window between the white curtain; no other painter could have made both form and colour stand out with all the direct force of reality, the hard uncompromising lines and unflinchingly asserted pattern, and have made it attempt to modify the effect by pictorial chiaroscuro; but there is -- of the hightest kind -- that of Nature herself: it is the wonderfully acute sense of colour, with its endless variety of gradations of tint, that enables Hunt thus to transfer unadulterated distinctness of sunlight to the delicate and fragile forms of the primrose -- to catch in all their threadlike delicacy the stamina of the May blossoms. It is to be obserbed of this artist, that the colours, however vivid, do not look as if they were laid on from the palette, but as if they glowed from the object itself that he depicts -- it is not the red or green or blue from the colourman's that you recognize, but the red of the flower or green of the egg -- real primrose colour or plum colour.