Watercolors Showing Living Animals by William Henry Hunt

by A Graduate of Pomona

Precious few watercolors by William Henry Hunt include images of living animals. The artist, who was devoted to painting only that which he could see in front on him as he was working, was said to be to nervous to deal with living animals. The major exceptions to this aversion to using live animals as models seems to be the occasional use of dogs and other four legged creatures who were more or less capable of standing still as the artist worked on capturing their images. When Hunt wanted to depict animals in unstable poses, such as those routinely held by John Swain, his primary child model, he did resort to the use of preparatory sketches, by which he could roughly capture a fleeting image and then use the sketch as the basis for the final, painted image. But the artist was clearly unhappy with even this much deviation from his almost religious devotion to nature, and he undoubtedly avoided the painting of living animals as much as possible.

It is interesting that Hunt was also reluctant to paint even humans who would not sit as a model for as long as it took to complete the works in which they would appear. The only exception seems to have been the sitter appearing in the two early watercolors showing the same "sportsman," both with virtually identical images of the sportsman's pony. The fact that Hunt apparently agreed to limit the amount of time the sitter would be required to pose is demonstrated by the existence of one of the etremely rare studies by Hunt which can be associated directly with one of his figure paintings, the study for the sportsman now in the Bristol Museum of Art, Bristol, England. It is one of only two such studies of which I am aware, the other being a very finished study for the Irish Orange Girl which is now in the British Museum. As with fidgety animals, Hunt was reported to have difficulty dealing with sitters from the higher classes of English society. The existence of a study for the more elaborate Sportsman watercolor provides significant evidence that the sitter was not a mere gamekeeper, but instead the Earl of Essex himself.

6 photos · 2 views