Pictures Every Child Should Know: A Selection of the World's Art Masterpieces for Young PeopleBacon, Mary Schell Hoke
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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
Although that journal failed utterly, its four numbers were worth
publishing, and are to-day worth reading. They were truly valuable,
for they contained a story and poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, besides
work of the other P. R. B's.
Above all things Hunt was conscientious in his work, trying with all
his might to represent things as be believed them to be. When he made
his "Scapegoat," he went to the shores of the Dead Sea to paint,
accompanied only by Arab guides, and there he found the desolate, hard
landscape for his picture. The hardships he experienced were very
many. The wretched goat he took with him died in the desert of that
dreary place after it had been no more than sketched in, but back in
Jerusalem Hunt finished the goat. Ruskin's description of the picture
helps one to feel all the desolation of the subject: "The salt sand of
the wilderness of Ziph, where the weary goat is dying. The
neighbourhood is stagnant and pestiferous, polluted by the decaying
vegetables brought down by the Jordan in its floods, and the bones of
the beasts of burden that have died by the way of the sea, lie like
wrecks upon its edge, bared by the vultures and bleached by the salt
ooze."
Even the superstitious Arabs would not go near the spot which Hunt
chose as the scene of his picture, but Hunt endured all things,
believing it due to his art.
When he painted "Christ in the Temple," he needed Jewish models, and
it was almost impossible for him to get them. He could not let them
know what they were to represent, or they would not have sat for him
at all but he succeeded in painting the "first Semitic presentment of
the Semitic Scriptures." In Jerusalem the Jews heard that he had come
"to traffic with the souls of the faithful," and they forbade him to
have any Jews come into his studio; so that he could not finish the
picture there. Back in London he had to find his models in the Jewish
school. He left the figures of Christ and the Virgin till the last and
then painted them "from a lady of the ancient race, distinguished
alike for her amiability and beauty, and a lad in one of the Jewish
schools, to which the husband of the lady furnished a friendly
introduction."
Thus, step by step, through the greatest difficulties, Holman Hunt
established a new school of painting--allegory with a modern treatment
which all could understand.
PLATE--THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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