William Henry Hunt
|
|
William Henry Hunt (March 28, 1790 - February 10, 1864), was an English water-colour painter.
He was born near Long Acre, London, and was apprenticed in about 1805 to John Varley, the landscape-painter, with whom he remained five or six years. He exhibited three oil pictures at the Royal Academy in 1807. He became connected with the Society of Painters in Watercolour at its beginning, and was elected an associate in 1824 and full member in 1827. Until the year of his death, he was one of the most prolific contributors to the Society's exhibitions. Many years of Hunt's uneventful but industrious life were spent at Hastings. He died of apoplexy.
Hunt was one of the creators of the English school of water-colour painting. His subjects, especially those of his later life, are extremely simple; but, by the delicacy, humour and fine power of their treatment, they rank second to works of the highestart only. Considered technically, his works exhibit all the resources of the water-colour painters craft from the purest transparent tinting to the boldest use of gouache, rough paper and scraping for texture. His sense of colour is perhaps as true as that of any English artist. He was, says John Ruskin, all in all, the finest ever painter of still life. Several characteristic examples of Hunt's work, as the "Boy and Goat," "Brown Study and Plums," "Primroses and Birds' Nests" are in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Reference
- This entry incorporates public domain text originally from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.