1827-1910 English painter. He worked as an office clerk in London from 1839 to 1843, attending drawing classes at a mechanics' institute in the evenings and taking weekly lessons from the portrait painter Henry Rogers. Holman Hunt overcame parental opposition to his choice of career in 1843, and this determined attitude and dedication to art could be seen throughout his working life. In July 1844, at the third attempt, he entered the Royal Academy Schools. His earliest exhibited works, such as Little Nell and her Grandfather (exh. British Institution, 1846; Sheffield, Graves A.G.), reveal few traces of originality, but the reading of John Ruskin's Modern Painters in 1847 was of crucial importance to Holman Hunt's artistic development. It led him to abandon the ambitious Christ and the Two Marys (Adelaide, A.G. S. Australia) in early 1848, when he realized its traditional iconography would leave his contemporaries unmoved. His next major work, the Flight of Madeline and Porphyro during the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry (1848; London, Guildhall A.G.), from John Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes', though displaced into a medieval setting, dramatized an issue dear to contemporary poets and central to Holman Hunt's art: love and youthful idealism versus loyalty to one's family. His first mature painting, it focuses on a moment of psychological crisis in a cramped and shallow picture space.   Related Paintings of william holman hunt,o.m.,r.w.s :. | Newton's Discovery of the Refraction of Light | Madame Cezanne in a Red Armchair | Ellens Green,near Cranleigh,Surrey (mk37) | Landscape | Osier |
Related Artists:
Joseph Bidauld
Carpentras(Vaucluse)1758-Montmorency (Val d'Oise)1846 French painter. He was apprenticed in Lyon for six years with his brother Jean-Pierre-Xavier Bidauld (1745-1813), a landscape and still-life painter. Subsequently, they left Lyon to travel together in Switzerland and Provence. In 1783 he moved to Paris, where he met Joseph Vernet (from whom he received valuable advice), Joseph-Siffred Duplessis and Jean-Honor? Fragonard. In 1785 he went to Rome with the assistance of Cardinal de Bernis and his patron, the dealer and perfumer Dulac. He stayed there for five years, travelling through Tuscany, Umbria and Campania and painting such works as Roman Landscape (1788; Basle, Kstmus.). Bidauld was closely involved with the circle of French Neo-classical painters in Rome in the 1780s. He was friendly with Louis Gauffier, Nicolas-Antoine Taunay and especially with Guillaume Lethiere, who became his brother-in-law and with whom he occasionally collaborated. On his return to Paris in 1790 he travelled extensively in France,
Johann Georg Ziesenis
(b Copenhagen, 1716; d Hannover, 4 March 1776). German painter of Danish birth. He trained with his father, Johann Georg Ziesenis (1681-1748); he became a German citizen in 1743 and subsequently was appointed court painter to Herzog Christian von Pfalz-Zweibrecken in Zweibrecken and, later, Mannheim. In the early 1750s he overcame his technical shortcomings by studying Flemish art, particularly the work of Rubens and van Dyck. He also introduced a new genre, the private court portrait. His portrait of Karl Philipp Theodor, Kurferst von der Pfalz (1757; Munich, Alte Pin.) is original in its intimate view of a nobleman posed at leisure in casual dress, seated in his private study.
Robert Walter Weir
Jun 18.1803-May 1.1889, Painter and teacher. By his own account he was self-taught, with the exception of a few lessons from an unknown heraldic painter named Robert Cooke. However, after exhibiting a few works that were praised by the local press, he was sent to Italy by a group of New York and Philadelphia businessmen for further studies. There he trained with Florentine history painter Pietro Benvenuti. After three years in Europe (1824-7), he returned to New York, where he quickly became a mainstay of the artistic community. In 1831 he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Design in New York, and three years later he was made instructor of drawing at the US Military Academy in West Point, New York, a post he held for the next 42 years.