1827-1910 British William Holman Hunt Galleries Hunt's intended middle name was "Hobman", which he disliked intensely. He chose to call himself Holman when he discovered that his middle name had been misspelled this way after a clerical error at his baptism at the church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Ewell.[1] Though his surname is "Hunt", his fame in later life led to the inclusion of his middle name as part of his surname, in the hyphenated form "Holman-Hunt", by which his children were known. After eventually entering the Royal Academy art schools, having initially been rejected, Hunt rebelled against the influence of its founder Sir Joshua Reynolds. He formed the Pre-Raphaelite movement in 1848, after meeting the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Along with John Everett Millais they sought to revitalise art by emphasising the detailed observation of the natural world in a spirit of quasi-religious devotion to truth. This religious approach was influenced by the spiritual qualities of medieval art, in opposition to the alleged rationalism of the Renaissance embodied by Raphael. He had many pupils including Robert Braithwaite Martineau (best known for his work "Last Days in the Old Home") who was a moderately successful painter although he died young. The Hireling Shepherd, 1851Hunt's works were not initially successful, and were widely attacked in the art press for their alleged clumsiness and ugliness. He achieved some early note for his intensely naturalistic scenes of modern rural and urban life, such as The Hireling Shepherd and The Awakening Conscience. However, it was with his religious paintings that he became famous, initially The Light of the World (now in the chapel at Keble College, Oxford, with a later copy in St Paul's Cathedral), having toured the world. After travelling to the Holy Land in search of accurate topographical and ethnographical material for further religious works, Hunt painted The Scapegoat, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple and The Shadow of Death, along with many landscapes of the region. Hunt also painted many works based on poems, such as Isabella and The Lady of Shalott. All these paintings were notable for their great attention to detail, their hard vivid colour and their elaborate symbolism. These features were influenced by the writings of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, according to whom the world itself should be read as a system of visual signs. For Hunt it was the duty of the artist to reveal the correspondence between sign and fact. Out of all the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Hunt remained most true to their ideals throughout his career. He eventually had to give up painting because failing eyesight meant that he could not get the level of quality that he wanted. His last major work, The Lady of Shalott, was completed with the help of an assistant (Edward Robert Hughes). Hunt married twice. After a failed engagement to his model Annie Miller, he married Fanny Waugh, who later modelled for the figure of Isabella. When she died in childbirth in Italy he sculpted her tomb up at Fiesole, having it brought down to the English Cemetery, beside the tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. His second wife, Edith, was Fanny's sister. At this time it was illegal in Britain to marry one's deceased wife's sister, so Hunt was forced to travel abroad to marry her. This led to a serious breach with other family members, notably his former Pre-Raphaelite colleague Thomas Woolner, who had married Fanny and Edith's third sister Alice. Hunt's autobiography Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905) was written to correct other literature about the origins of the Brotherhood, which in his view did not adequately recognise his own contribution. Many of his late writings are attempts to control the interpretation of his work. In 1905, he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII. At the end of his life he lived in Sonning-on-Thames.  Related Paintings of William Holman Hunt :. | The School of Nature | A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids, a scene of persecution by druids in ancient Britain p | Isabella and the Pot of Basil | Unsere englische Kuste | Claudio and Isabella |
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Simon de Vos
Simon de Vos (Antwerp, 20 October 1603-15 October 1676, Antwerp) was a Flemish Baroque painter of genre and cabinet pictures. De Vos studied with Cornelis de Vos (1603-76), to whom he is not related, from 1615 until 1620. In 1620 he joined Antwerp's guild of St. Luke, and then he probably travelled to Rome where he came under the influence of the "low-life" genre paintings of the Bentvueghels and the bambocciate. A Caravaggesque influence, by way of the German painter Johann Liss active in Italy during the 1620s is discernible in De Vos's paintings from this time on. In contrast to the earlier "low-life" paintings, works from the late 1620s until around 1640, which were made after returning to Antwerp, are mostly small "merry company" and courtly genre scenes reminiscent of contemporary Dutch painters Dirck Hals and Pieter Codde. After 1640, De Vos turned away from genre scenes altogether and painted mostly small cabinet paintings of history subjects, influenced stylistically at first by Peter Paul Rubens and then increasingly by Anthony van Dyck. Examples include The Beheading of St. Paul (1648) in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. He married Catharina van Utrecht, the sister of Adriaen van Utrecht, in 1628.
MURILLO, Bartolome Esteban
Spanish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1617-1682 Spanish religious and portrait painter. He was born in Seville, where most of his life was spent. There, c.1645, he painted a series of 11 pictures of the history of the Franciscan order for a monastery. These brought him immediate fame, and for the remainder of his life he was the favorite painter of the wealthy and pious Andalusian capital. His early works show the influence of Zurbarn in the dramatic use of light and shadow. Murillo adapted several compositions from northern and Italian prints. Notable works of his early years include St. Leander, St. Isidore, Vision of St. Anthony (all: cathedral, Seville), Birth of the Virgin (Louvre), and his series for the Church of Santa Maria la Blanca. In 1660 he was instrumental in founding the Seville Academy, of which he shared the presidency with the younger Francisco de Herrera. From 1670 to 1682, Murillo painted many of his major religious works, including those for the Charity Hospital and for the Capuchin convent (Seville Mus.). These religious works, particularly the Madonnas, are noted for their sweetness of mood. In 1682, while working on the Marriage of St. Catherine for the Capuchin church of Cediz, Murillo fell from a scaffold and died as a result of his injuries. Murillo's greatest works include his fine portraits, Don Andres de Andrade y la Col (Metropolitan Mus.) and Knight of the Collar (Prado) and his naturalistic genre paintings, such as Girl and Her Duenna (National Gall., Washington, D.C.) and Peasant Boy (National Gall., London).
Jens Juel
1745-1802 Danish Jens Juel Galleries was a Danish painter, primarily known for his many portraits, of which the largest collection is on display at Frederiksborg Castle. He was born in the house of his mothers brother Johan Jørgensen, who was a school teacher in Balslev on the island of Fyn. Jens Juel was the illegitimate son of Vilhelmine Elisabeth Juel (January 1725 ?C March 1799), who served at Wedellsborg and a fine gentleman, probably a Wedell or Lord Jens Juel. When Juel was one year old, his mother married Jørgen Jørgensen (1724 ?C June 4, 1796), who was a school master in Gamborg, not far from Balslev, and he grew up in Gamborg. He showed an interest in painting from an early age, and his parents sent him to be an apprentice of painter Johann Michael Gehrman in Hamburg, where he worked hard for five or six years and improved himself so far, that he created himself a reputation as a painter of portraits, landscapes, etc. Just over twenty years old he came to Copenhagen to attend the Royal Danish Academy of Art. In 1767 he was awarded its small gold medal and in 1771 the large gold medal. In 1772 he left Copenhagen to be away for eight years. Initially, he went to Rome where he stayed for four years together with other Danish artists, including Abildgaard. From Rome, he moved to Paris, at the time a center of portrait painting. In 1777 he moved on to Geneva, where he stayed for two years at the home of his friend Charles Bonnet in the company of other Danish artists, including etcher Clemens. In Geneva, Juel soon earned himself a reputation as an excellent artist and he painted many portraits. Through Bonnet, who had become a member of honour of the Danish academy, his reputation reached Denmark. After eight years of absence, he returned to Copenhagen in 1780 after a brief stay in Hamburg, where he met Klopstock. It was at his house, that he painted his well-known picture of "Messiadens Digter". Back in Copenhagen, he created himself a reputation as a painter of portraits for the royal house, nobility and the well-to-do. April 4, 1782, he was unanimously elected to be a member of the academy by Mandelberg, Weidenhaupt and Abildgaard. He became the director of the academy in 1795.