19. William Henry Hunt, Slumber, late 1830s, Probably exhibited 1838.

Slumber

Birmingham [England] Museums and Art Gallery, No. 168/28

Watercolor, bodycolor, and gum arabicwith scratching out

13 5/8 X 16 7/8 in., 34.2 X 42.8 cm.

Signed, l.r., W. HUNT

 

The Country People catalogue entry for this watercolor contains several inaccuracies, most of which arise from an attempt to relate the painting to other, similar works by Hunt. This is clearly a painting that falls comfortably within John Ruskin's first catagory of rural subjects without any sentimentality or humor. Although the image was engraved in 1843 under the title, A Sleeping Nymph, as noted in the catalogue (fig. 19b), it was also one of two watercolors in the exhibition, along with The Young Gleaner, which was engraved and included in the 1844 volume, Hunt's Comic Sketches. See fig. 19b. Attempts to distinguish the quality or public appeal of Hunt's watercolors based on notions of whether any particle one is "comic" in nature simply do not result, in most instances, in any meaningful insights into contempory opinions regarding Hunt's work.

 

Similarly, it is particularly risky to reach conclusions about a Hunt watercolor's place in the artist's oeuvre based on comparisons to paintings which have never been seen but are only known to modern researchers through mere lists of titles of Hunt watercolors exhibited at the watercolor society and other exhibitions -- 19th century exhibition catalogues were virtually never illustrated. In this case, the authors of the Courtauld catalogue were incorrect in all of their assumptions about a few watercolors related to Slumber.

 

While Hunt painted several large watercolors, primarily during the period 1836-1842, with the same or similar settings as Slumber, the sequence in which these paintings came about is not at all as explained in the catalogue. Of the works mentioned in conection with the entry for Slumber, none can be said to be either prototypes or variants of Slumber itself. In 1837, Hunt exhibited the dated work that is at the Townley Hall Art Gallery in Burnley, England and which now goes under the title "Cymon and Iphigenia." That fine work by Hunt was almost certainly entitled "Mischief" in the 1837 exhibition. An entirely different and larger watercolor, also dated 1837, is the Girl in a Wood House, fig. 13e, which Witt and the Courtauld authors erroneously believed to be identical to the Burnley watercolor. There are two compelling reasons why the painting exhibited under the latter title was not the painting in Burnley. During the late 1830s, Hunt used two major structures at his family's farm, Parkgate in Bramly, Hampshire, as settings for several of his major figure paintings -- paintings which Ruskin considered some of his best works -- a conclusion shared by the present author. Several show the farm's main barn while just as many take place in the easily identifiable, smaller building which is usually referred to as a shed or as the wood house in the original titles used by the artist. Watercolors which depicted the wood house almost always included images of the same old wooden chest seen in fig. 13a (also seen in The Outhouse, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, originally exhibited as A Wood House, SPWC, 1838, No. , Boy in an Outhouse, Huntington Art Collection, San Marino, CA, originally exhibited as A Wood House, SPWC 1837, No. , and several other works by Hunt). Slumber and Mischief, on the other hand, show figures sleeping at ground level (not in a loft) of the barn at Parkgate Farm. Other works by Hunt which show the barn are The Eavesdropper (fig C) and the Minneapolis Institute of Art's large watercolor, " Interior of a Barn" (fig 19f). Most of the barn paintings show the main, Dutch door of the barn, which can clearly be seen in Mischief and just barely seen to the extreme left in Slumber. The important point is that Hunt, who was very careful and precise in the titles he chose for his exhibited works, would never have used the term Wood House in the title of any painting which instead was set in the barn, such as Mischief..

 

The existence of a watercolor which was actually exhibited, in 1838, under the title "Cymon and Iphigenia," both complicates and clarifies the situation surrounding the works mentioned in the catalogue under the entry for Slumber. Note 5 of that entry states, based on the authority of Witt, that the Burnley watercolor from 1837 which eventually became known as Cymon and Iphigenia, is a smaller replica of the actual Cymon and Iphigenia from 1838 [the primary version of which is in the Sheepshank collection while a nearly identical replica has been on the art market for several years.] It should be noted that Witt also confused the provenance of Sheepshank primary version of this composition and erroneously included part of it's ownership history in his provenance entry for Mischief.

 

Since the lithograph of "Cymon and Iphigenia" shown in Fig 6 is clearly based on the actual 1838 watercolor of the same name (fig 19b), I am at a loss to understand why it is claimed in the catalogue that the lithograph is based on another, currently untraced Hunt watercolor known only from its title, The Farmer's Lad. And if the composition reflected in the lithograph had actually been based on The Farmer's Boy, which was exhibited in 1842, neither the engraved image nor The Farmer's Boy could have been the inspiration for Mischief, which was certainly painted in 1936 or early 1837.

 

Of course, the watercolor from 1837 which is identified here as the actual painting exhibited as Girl in a Wood House" shows a single figure of a girl, as would be expected. It would have been very strange for Hunt to have exhibited a painting of a boy and a girl under a title which only mentioned a girl.

 

For the sake of being thorough, the second reason why the Burnely watercolor is extremely unlikely to be identical to Girl in a Wood House, as speculated by Tom Jones and stated as a fact by John Witt and the authors of the Courtauld catalogue, is that Hunt's friend and patron, John Hornby Maw, asked the artist to paint a replica of the Burnley painting since the original had been sold before Maw had been able to see the watercolor at the 1837 exhibition. [OR, it is possible that the Burnley painting is Maw's replica and that the primary version is the one which is lost or currently untraced.] Records of the watercolor society show that Mischief had been sold, which usually meant, in the absence of a sales price next to the entry, that the watercolor had been sold before the exhibition had even begun -- something which was increasingly true over the course of Hunt's exhibition history. "Girl in a Wood House," however, is shown in the records as being for sale at 35 guineas, which usually meant that the painting did not sell during the course of the exhibition. There simply would not have been any reason for Maw to ask for a replica of a painting which was available for purchase, at least one that had not already been sold before the beginning of the exhibition,

 

Of course none of the above is actually relevant to an appreciation of all the watercolors mentioned -- all are truly among the finest works painted by Hunt. But it is time for the 30 years of confusion regarding the exhibition histories and settings of these works to finally be set straight. The existence of the list of Hunt's exhibited works, which first appeared in Vol XII of the Old Water-Colour Society [an annual publication] as an appendix to a reprint of F.G. Stephens 1865 article on Hunt from Frasier's Magazine [which has no such list of exhibited paintings] has resulted in as many erroneous assumptions as useful information concerning the actual dates of Hunt's watercolors. It seems that any guess that a particular work is the same as a name on the list of an exhibited work invariably ends up being incorrect.

Done