Pictures Every Child Should Know: A Selection of the World's Art Masterpieces for Young PeopleBacon, Mary Schell Hoke
General
Pictures Every Child Should Know: A Selection of the World's Art Masterpieces for Young People
Bacon, Mary Schell Hoke
Art -- Juvenile literature; Painters -- Juvenile literature; Painting -- Juvenile literature
The new artist was Holman Hunt. He was the son of a London
warehouseman, with no inclination whatever for learning, so that it
seemed simply a waste of time to send him to school. This continually
repeated history of artists who seem to know nothing outside their
brushes and colours, is astonishing, but it is true that artists for
the most part must be regarded as artists, pure and simple, and not as
men of even reasonably good intellectual attainments, and more or less
this accounts for their low estate centuries ago. One does not
associate "learning" and the artist. When we have such splendid
examples as Dürer and two or three others we discuss their
intellectuality because they are so unusual.
Holman Hunt was like most of his brother artists in all but his
art. He hated school and at twelve years of age was taken from it. His
father wanted him to become a warehouse merchant like himself, and he
began life as clerk or apprentice to an auctioneer. He next went into
the employment of some calico-printers of Manchester. The designing of
calicoes can hardly be called art, even if the department of design
had fallen to Holman Hunt's lot and we have no evidence that it did,
but he started to be an artist nevertheless, there in the
print-shop. He found in his new place another clerk who cared for art;
and this sympathy encouraged him to fix his mind upon painting more
than ever. He used to draw such natural flies upon the window panes
that his employer tried one day to "shoo away a whole colony of flies
that seemed miraculously to have settled." This gave the clerks much
amusement, and also attracted attention to Holman Hunt's genius.
His very small salary was spent, not on his support, but in lessons
from a portrait painter of the city. His parents did not like this,
but they could not help themselves, and thus this greatest of the
Pre-Raphaelites began his work.
The Pre-Raphaelites were a little group of men who believed that
artists were drawing too much on their imaginations, not painting
things as they saw them, and that the painter had become incapable of
close observation. He worked in his studio, did not get near enough to
nature, and instead of trying to follow along this line, this group of
men, with their new and partly correct ideas, meant to go back further
than the great masters themselves and present an elemental art. This
was a part of their scheme and partly it was justified, but of all the
men who undertook to make a new school, Holman Hunt was the only one
who remained, and will remain forever, a representative. He alone
stuck to the original purpose of the group and developed it into a
truly great school; so that it is he alone we need to know.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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