"William Henry Hunt, Country People," an Exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, 24 June - 17 September 2017

The Courtauld Gallery in London has organized an exhibition of 20 watercolors by William Henry Hunt which is claimed to be the first effort to explore the artist's dignified images of rural workers. While a handful of Hunt's later works, painted using the many innovative techniques which brought the artist fame, are also included, the focus of the exhibition is clearly on the artist's early works, painted in the traditional 18th century watercolor style based on ink outlines colored in with transparent washes. While any public exhibition of Hunt's work, all periods of which have been largely neglected for a hundred years, is to be applauded, the Courtauld exhibit has been used to further the notion that the artist's early works were not just painted in a different style but somehow depicted special subject matters and reflected a different attitude on the part of the artist toward those subjects --single figure images of gardeners, gamekeepers, and other members of the rural working classes.

The authors of the catalogue which accompanies the exhibit boldly claim that many consider these early watercolors to be Hunt's best work, while contending that a class of works from a slightly later period, namely the single "comic" figures of the 1830s and 1840s, have suffered most from changing tastes. While the tastes of any given individual are necessarily subjective, the arguments advanced by the catalogue's authors to establish the primacy of Hunt's early work cannot be sustained on any factual or historical basis.

Hunt's early works were virtually unknown to the public from almost the time of their creation until the last years of the 20th century, and for good reason. Due to his physical limitations, Hunt did not truly become a professional artist until rather late in life. Although he was apprenticed at a typical age (16 year old) to an important watercolor artist, John Varley, Hunt did not emerge from his triaining as an artist who supported himself through the sale of his works. He exhibited a handful of oil paintings at the Royal Academy from 1807-1811, while still residing with his parents, but these early efforts, which were in no way numerous enough to provide a living for the artist, had no apparent impact on British art. During the 1820s, when the early watercolors in the Courtauld exhibit were painted, he spent time painting at Bushey, including work at Cassiobury Park, and at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. But the small number of watercolors painted through the 1820s neither brought public acclaim nor significant income to Hunt. He exhibited no works at all in 1812, 1813, 1816, 1817, 1820, or 1821, and he submitted only 7 watercolors to the Society of Painters in Water-Colours between 1822 and 1825. In fact the early works included in the Courtauld exhibit constitute the majority of all of Hunt's early rustic figures known to exist, and, altogether, Hunt's output of all genres of watercolor painting from the 1820s was not consistent with what would have been produced by any artist who was endeavoring to support himself or trying to set himself apart from contemporary artists. It is very unlikely that Hunt was attempting during this period to paint subjects based on any perception of social conditions or any calculation as to how his images of rural workers would resonate with buyers at the watercolor society's exhibitions.

It was only around 1827, when Hunt apparently had become independent of his parents and began to exhibit at the watercolor society as a full member, that he broke away from the ink and wash style of his early years, began to paint a larger range of subjects, and finally became noticed for his innovative techniques, all at the age of 37! In later years, another member of the watercolor society had no recollection of the early gardeners and gamekeepers but thought that Hunt emerged out of nowhere around 1830 when he gained quick success, first with shockingly original watercolors of nighttime scenes illuminated by candlelight and, shortly thereafter, with his extremely popular comic images.

From the outset Hunt painted what was around him, although he always had a preference for painting figures over landscapes or even still lifes. When he was being carried around in a donkey cart in the neighborhood of Bushey, he painted the workers at Cassiobury Park, children in and around the local churches, or views of the local villages. When he was at Hastings, on the Sourth coast of England, he painted fishermen, fisherboys sitting on rocks, and smugglers. He certainly had no special preference for painting gardeners or gamekeepers; if anything he was more fond of fisherfolk as subjects. And, insofar as watercolors depicting adults, the artist almost always, throughout his career, painted his subjects in a dignified manner with no elements of sentiment or humor.

In 1830, Hunt began to use as a frequent model a Hastings fisher boy, John Swain. Most of the works which came to be known as "comic pictures" depicted this boy, who was adept a holding a pose as long as required. Swain continued to appear in a large number of Hunt's paintings until about 1844, when he was too old to model for juvenile subjects. While a small percentage of these works are broad in their humor, the vast majority were, at most, only mildly amusing. No more than a handful are dependent for their humor on contemporary references, so it is inaccurate to say that the group as a whole have suffered from changing times. In fact, insofar as Hunt's figure subjects are concerned, Hunt's colorful images of children from the 1830s and 1840s have historically received far more critical and public acclaim and have continued until recent times to sell for significantly higher prices at auction than works from the early part of his career. Along with a group of very fine images of children and adults which Hunt painted in a barn and a shed on his family's farm, these middle-period works have always been the paintings which formed the basis for Hunt's fame as a figure painter.

Although the records of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours are incomplete for the years in which Hunt exhibited his early watercolors of country people, the fact that a number were included in Hunt's estate auction in 1864 shows that many did not sell when they were originally offered to the public. The prices for the early figurative watercolors at the estate sale ranged from £1 10s. to £8 8s., which was very low considering that Hunt's comic figures and other works in his mature style were routinely selling in the range of £30 to £100 at that time, and one comic figure, Too Hot! from 1832, had already sold for £300 before the artist's death. In fact, auction records reveal that almost none of these early watercolors of rural workers ever appeared on the market from the time they were painted until very recent times, the most noteable exception being one of the best, the Gamekeeper (fig. 12) from the collection of Ralph Bernal which was later owned by William Quilter. In the Bernal sale in 1853, this watercolor sold for the modest amount of £6 6s. At the first Quilter sale in 1875, at which the aforementioned Too Hot! sold for £787 10s., The Gardener failed to sale for the minimum bid of £36 15s.

Hunt's mature watercolors, including many of his comic pictures, were included in numerous exhibits before and after the artist's death, and they were generally very well reviewed by the critics. Hunt's early works were not part of these exhibitions, with the exception of Quilter's Gamekeeper, which was only once even mentioned in a critical review. Which leads to John Ruskin and his exhibition of works by William Hunt and Samuel Prout.

Ruskin, who had vigorously championed and highly praised Hunt's work toward the end of the artist's career, exhibited a rather large number of Hunt's watercolors at the Fine Art Society in 1879-80 and wrote a critical review of the exhibited works. As part of his critique, Ruskin famously divided Hunt's watercolors into 6 types, 3 of which concerned figure paintings. The authors of the Courtauld catalogue argue that the early "Country People" watercolors in their exhibit fall within Ruskin's highest category, works depicting country life without any attempt at sentiment or humor, which the critic considered to be virtually faultless and usually very beautiful. The problem with this claim is that only one of Hunt's early works, Quilter's Gamekeeper, was included in the exhibit, and Ruskin did not even single it out for praise. Moreover, Ruskin cited several specific watercolors in the exhibit as examples of his favored class, all of which are mature works which are in no way similar to the early productions in ink with washes. And of those few works singled out by Ruskin for highest praise (figs. A - D), one, fig. C, is actually one of Hunt's most famous comic figures.

The authors of the Courthauld catalogue cannot be faulted for having personal preferences for Hunt's earliest works, a taste shared by a number of modern academics and art dealers.. But it would safe to bet that most members of the general public would not share that opinion, given the limited color of these paintings and subject matters which are far removed from modern experiences. There is a reason why 19th century viewers reacted so much more favorably to Hunt's later figure subjects, with their often brillant coloring and their amazing representations of the textures seen in nature. Modern viewers would be well served by considering more examples of the artist's later work before forming final opinions about the merits of watercolors by this very important British artist.

This album consists of photographs arranged to correspond, in large part, to the catalogue entries and photographs identified as figures in the Courtauld Gallery's Country People catalogue. The following numbering systems is used for the photos in this album:

The works exhibited in the Courtauld exhibition are numbered consecutively as Nos. 1 through 20.

Photos in the Courtauld catalogue which are identified by a figure number follow the image corresponding to each exhbited work's catalogue number, i.e., fig. 7 appears within the catalogue entry for exhibited work number 1, A Farmer in a barn, so the image in this ablbum which corresponds to fig. 7 in the catalogue appears immediately after the photograph of exhibited work No. 1.

Photographs in this album of Hunt watercolors which are mentioned, either in the text or a note to the catalogue entry for an exhibited work but which are not actually illustrated in the Courtauld catalogue appear after the photograph in this album of the corresponding exhibited work and after any photographs of paintings identified as figures in connection with an image of an exhibited work.

Photos of any Images identified as figures in the introductory essay of the catalogue appear after the album photograph corresponding to catalogue entry No. 20.

Photographs of Hunt watercolors which are not pictured or mentioned in the Courtauld catalogue but which relate to my comments or information contained in the catalogue follow the photos corresponding to figures contained in the introduction to the catalogue and are numbered in capital letters.

Many of the photographs included in this album have commentary which was written some time ago when the same photographs were attached to other albums of photos from my photostream. Imformation which seems unrelated to my comments about the Courtauld Gallery exhibition can be considered to the extent any reader is interested in that material.