Lot Essay
According to an article in the Art Journal in 1897, Hacker was 'possessed with a similar spirit to that of Mr Dicksee in endeavouring to avoid the danger of painting in a single groove'. In fact he is probably more difficult to pigeonhole than Dicksee. It is significant that while his painting The Temptation of Sir Percival (1894; Leeds), a wonderfully theatrical essay in late academic Pre-Raphaelitism, appeared in the Last Romantics exhibition at the Barbican in 1989, his Royal Academy diploma work, A Wet Night at Piccadilly Circus (1910), was included in the Impressionism in Britain show at the same venue last year.
Born in London, the son of an engraver, Hacker entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1876, and made his debut at the Academy two years later. In the early 1880s he continued his studies under Leon Bonnat in Paris, and like Stanhope Forbes, who was a fellow student at the RA Schools and shared accomodation with him in Paris, he was influenced by French plein-air realism, attracting attention with a scene of peasant life, Her Daughter's Legacy, shown at the RA in 1881, and helping to found the New English Art Club in 1886. However, the following year he exhibited Pelagia and Philammon (Liverpool), the first of a series of pictures in a full-blown French academic style, of which The Annunciation, bought for the Chantrey Bequest in 1892, the already mentioned Temptation of Sir Percival, and The Cloister or the World (1896) at Bradford, are further examples. Visits to Spain and North Africa found reflections in several paintings, notably Vae Victis, a dramatic account of the sack of Morocco exhibited in 1890.
As the taste for literary and historical subjects declined, Hacker found other outlets for his versatile talents. Like so many artists in his position, he took up portraiture; he also returned to rustic and domestic genre, while experimenting with misty atmospheric renderings of the London streets. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1910, and died of a heart attack at his home in the Cromwell Road on 12 November 1919.
The present picture is one of his later genre scenes, although it is treated on a scale which looks back to his academic figure subjects of the 1890s. Technically, it displays the 'vague but pleasant iridescence' which his Times obituary noted as being characteristic of his work. When it was exhibited in 1913 the reaction against Victorian pictorial values was already well advanced, and it is not surprising that The Times noted it in a review headed 'The Vice of Prettiness', and could only observe rather vaguely that 'the sentimentality struggles with a certain amount of disinterested observation'.
Born in London, the son of an engraver, Hacker entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1876, and made his debut at the Academy two years later. In the early 1880s he continued his studies under Leon Bonnat in Paris, and like Stanhope Forbes, who was a fellow student at the RA Schools and shared accomodation with him in Paris, he was influenced by French plein-air realism, attracting attention with a scene of peasant life, Her Daughter's Legacy, shown at the RA in 1881, and helping to found the New English Art Club in 1886. However, the following year he exhibited Pelagia and Philammon (Liverpool), the first of a series of pictures in a full-blown French academic style, of which The Annunciation, bought for the Chantrey Bequest in 1892, the already mentioned Temptation of Sir Percival, and The Cloister or the World (1896) at Bradford, are further examples. Visits to Spain and North Africa found reflections in several paintings, notably Vae Victis, a dramatic account of the sack of Morocco exhibited in 1890.
As the taste for literary and historical subjects declined, Hacker found other outlets for his versatile talents. Like so many artists in his position, he took up portraiture; he also returned to rustic and domestic genre, while experimenting with misty atmospheric renderings of the London streets. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1910, and died of a heart attack at his home in the Cromwell Road on 12 November 1919.
The present picture is one of his later genre scenes, although it is treated on a scale which looks back to his academic figure subjects of the 1890s. Technically, it displays the 'vague but pleasant iridescence' which his Times obituary noted as being characteristic of his work. When it was exhibited in 1913 the reaction against Victorian pictorial values was already well advanced, and it is not surprising that The Times noted it in a review headed 'The Vice of Prettiness', and could only observe rather vaguely that 'the sentimentality struggles with a certain amount of disinterested observation'.