Watercolors by William Henry Hunt Exhibited at the Society of Painters in Water-colours
This is an attempt to establish a visual chronology for watercolors painted by William Henry Hunt, which is notoriously difficult to accomplish due to the fact that a relatively small percentage, especially of his still life watercolors, are dated.
Hunt dated a number of his watercolors in the 1820s, and he continued to occasionally add a date to his works through 1839. He virtually never dated any of his watercolors from 1840 through 1859, only to again start to add dates, now to his still life watercolors, in the early 1860s. Most dated works were exhibited at the annual Spring Exhibitions (usually in April of each year) at the Society of Painters in Water-colours. But the date was based on when a particular work was painted, not necessarily on the year of the exhibition in which it was included. Therefore, a watercolor dated 1834 by the artist could have been painted any time after the April 1834 watercolor exhibition up until the opening of the 1835 exhibition. Still, the dates are obviously very helpful in establishing a fairly accurate chronology.
Also useful are the records of the Society of Painters in Water-colours, which list by artist, exhibition number, and title of each work all watercolors by Hunt and other exhibitors at the Spring Exhibitions. While all the printed catalogs of the exhibitions which included works by Hunt still exist, some of the ledger books in which the prices and the identities of the purchasers of the works have been lost over time [one volume even since I personally copied all of the purchase information regarding Hunt's exhibited pieces from the books that were still at the Old Watercolour Society in 1986]. When original price information still exists, it is possible to determine a rough size of a work, since Hunt based his prices almost exclusively on the size of a picture.
Other sources of information useful in establishing dates are auction catalogs from the 19th and early 20th century, which occasionally note exhibition dates, based presumably on information provided by those who consigned works they had bought at the watercolor exhibitions to be sold at auction. Even more revealing are the reviews of the annual exhibitions which appeared in various contemporary newspapers and journals. Only a few publications routinely reviewed these exhibitions, and the reviews usually mention only a small number of works exhibited by each artist, when a Hunt watercolor was actually described, along with mention of the original exhibition title of the work, these reviews can lead to the identification of an existing, known watercolor with the original exhibition information.
The photographs in this set are of those watercolors which I believe can be matched to a year or an watercolor exhibition with a fairly high degree of certainty, based on the above criteria. This is a WORK IN PROGRESS, as I have a tremendous quantity of material to review and enter here.
