Sunday, March 22, 2009

Alfred William Hunt


[A lady by a rocky stream in dappled sunlight] 1858
pencil and watercolour with gum arabic heightened with touches of bodycolour and with scratching out
.
1830 - 1896.
An English painter. He was son of Andrew Hunt, a landscape painter.
He was born in Liverpool. He began to paint while at the Liverpool Collegiati School; but as the idea of adopting the artist's profession was not favoured by his father, he went in 1848 to Corpus Christi College, Oxford to study classics. His career there was distinguished; he won the Newdigate Prize in 1851 for his poem "Nineveh", and became a Fellow of Corpus in 1857.
He did not, however, abandon his artistic practice for, encouraged by Ruskin, he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1854, and thenceforward regularly contributed landscapes in oil and water-colour to London and provincial exhibitions. In 1861 he married, gave up his Fellowship, and in 1862 was elected as an Associate of the Old Water-Colour Society, receiving full membership in 1864. His work is distinguished mainly by its exquisite quality and a poetic rendering of atmosphere. He was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the extraordinary detail apparent in his landscapes and the careful rendering of grass, leaves and trees is a consequence of this.

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