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拍品专文
We are grateful to Judith Bronkhurst for providing us with the following catalogue entry:
This fine watercolour (referred to throughout the following text as Athens) with its unusual compositional format and sensitive observation of a Mediterranean night scene, was begun in the Greek capital in January 1892.
The previous year was one of success and stress for Holman Hunt. In June he had the gratification of seeing The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple fetch 3,400 guineas in these Rooms, and two months later Liverpool Corporation bought his latest major religious painting, The Triumph of the Innocents, for a similar sum. Meanwhile, his first major subject picture for some years, May Morning on Magdalen Tower (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), was being exhibited in a one-picture show in Old Bond Street. Finishing it had taken its toll on Hunt's health. His asthma became increasingly disabling, and on 13 November he wrote to his friend Vernon Lushington: 'I have been hindered more than once or twice from seeing you by this overworked body of mine failing me at critical junctures. . . Now you will have heard the doctor advises a holiday. And we are going shortly to make a tour more or less about the water which the gods made - it seems - to rear up, delight and strengthen willing men' (MS. private collection).
This poetic reaction to the Mediterranean and classical mythology may seem slightly unexpected. But Hunt had been imbued with enthusiasm for Greek culture from the 1840s, when, like all art students in London at that period, he had carefully studied the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum. In 1848, when Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti drew up their List of Immortals, Phidias was included, and in 1863, in his series of articles on Augustus Egg in the Reader, Hunt enthusiastically praised the sculptor's treatment of the goddesses in the Parthenon pediments. Homer was accorded two stars in the List of Immortals (only Shakespeare and the author of the book of Job got three, while Jesus Christ scored four), and was very much in the artist's mind when he had his first sight of the Greek Islands. This was on the final stages of his journey to the East of 1854-6, during a boat trip from Beirut to Constantinople. The vessel travelled close to the shore of Rhodes and the Island of Samos on 28 November 1855, inspiring Hunt to execute the watercolour In the Archipelago (private collection). Its calmness contrasts strongly with his excitement at passing a site he knew so well from Homer's Iliad: 'Yesterday I with my living eyes looked upon the plains of Troy - saw the tumuli of Ajax, Patroclus and Achilles - with Mount Ida standing up afar, clouded and dreaming away the day, as if remembering when the world was young . . .' This letter of 2 December to Michael Halliday (who in 1856 was to become Hunt's pupil and co-tenant) continues: 'a whole life time of my shadowy dreams on that head were made into realities thereby for ever' (MS. private collection).
Despite Hunt's love of classical culture, he was not concerned to translate his 'shadowy dreams on that head' into artistic realities in terms of subject matter. His reaction to the classical revival in British art which gained currency from the 1860s was a modification of his hard-edged Pre-Raphaelite style and a heightened appreciation of the decorative qualities of two-dimensional art. But he wished to base his reputation on major paintings that broke new ground in attempting to embody complex ideas in pictorial form. Only in one instance did his reverence for classical culture spill over into his paintings in a direct way. In 1891, the year the Mediterranean trip was planned, we find him designing a bas-relief of Hercules (Manchester Art Gallery) for inclusion in the work that was to occupy him for nearly twenty years, The Lady of Shalott (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford). The features of the classical hero appear to be based on a representation of Herakles fighting the Amazons in the frieze from the temple of Apollo Epikourios at Bassae, which Hunt could have seen in the British Museum.
At the end of 1891 Hunt and his wife Edith left London for their last trip to the East. After a fortnight's holiday in Alassio, the couple, newly refreshed, visited Genoa, Pisa, Lucca, Rome and Naples. On 14 January 1892 they travelled to Athens. According to the 1889 Baedeker, its population at the time, 'including the suburban villages', was about 85,000 (p. 36). All the better class hotels were in the Place de la Constitution, the centre then, as now, of the visitors' quarter. The Hunts may well have stayed at the luxurious Hotel Grande Bretagne, situated opposite what was then the Royal Palace (from 1935 the seat of the Greek Parliament). This huge edifice by the Bavarian architect Friedrich von Gärtner was erected in 1836-41 on rising ground east of Constitution (now Syndagma) Square. It is described in the Athens Blue Guide as 'a plain rectangle, built of broken limestone faced with cement, with numerous small windows' (1962, p. 13). Our watercolour was shown at the Birmingham Royal Society of Artists in 1893 with the title The Grand Square before the King's Palace, Athens, and Hunt must have been standing on the terrace directly in front of Gärtner's building. Light from its windows illuminates the gardens which are the principal focus of the composition. According to Baedeker, these were in the middle of the square and consisted of 'a velvety lawn, overhung by oranges, oleanders, and other southern trees' (op. cit., p. 45).
In 1895 Hunt exhibited his watercolour in Liverpool with the title The Grand Piazza at Athens, with the two bronze statues known as 'The Runners', of the time of Pericles. The athletes at the far right of the composition are copies of bronze statues from the Villa dei Papiri, Herculaneum. Hunt could have seen them in the Naples Archaeological Museum (inv. nos. 5626-7) just a few days before seeing the replicas in Athens (see R. Cantilena et. al., Le Collezioni del Museo Nazionale di Napoli, vol. II, Rome and Milan, 1989, nos. 158 and 159). These Roman statues were in turn copies of a Greek original dating from the end of the 4th century BC. The bronze figures positioned on the terrace in Hunt's watercolour look as though they are about to run out of the picture space, and are wittily juxtaposed with the living figures in the left foreground gesticulating in the direction of the Acropolis. The man in red is based on a study in a sketchbook of 1892, but Hunt has changed the colour of the jacket from blue to red to harmonize with the bright orange fruit on the trees in the garden.
This flexibility shows how far the artist was concerned to synthesize what Ruskin called the prosaic and poetic aspects of Pre-Raphaelitism. Hunt had long outgrown his obsession with painting everything, 'even the pebbles of the foreground from the place itself'. But he would surely have argued that Athens was a landscape that fulfilled his aim, as set forth in this letter of 12 August 1855 to W.M. Rossetti, 'to give you a truer notion of the thing'. He considered this an idea that 'naturally suggests itself to a painter in travelling unless he be entirely thoughtless' (MS. Huntington Library, San Marino). Hunt was never a thoughtless painter, and in Athens the 'truer notion of the thing' resides in his treatment of light. The dark sky lit by the bright stars so typical of the Mediterranean is juxtaposed with the light shining from the palace illuminating the foreground, areas of which Hunt has heightened with bodycolour. This exploration of the counterpoint of real and artificial light is part of a continuing process for the artist. The earliest, and most famous, instance is, of course, The Light of the World, but it is also an important feature of the subject pictures London Bridge on the Night of the Marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, 1863-6 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), and The Triumph of the Innocents. (Incidentally, the dog in the foreground of Athens is not dissimilar to the dogs in the background of that painting.) In terms of pure landscape, after The Thames at Chelsea, Evening, 1853 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), Hunt continued to explore such nocturnal light effects in watercolours executed in Egypt, Jerusalem (1854) and Florence (1867), and in The Terrace, Berne, by Moonlight (Rikjsprentenkabinet, Amsterdam). This was begun in 1875 from the Hunts' hotel bedroom window, and like Athens has a foreground illuminated from an unseen source.
The Hunts left Greece in early February 1892, and on 9 February Hunt wrote from Egypt to his Fulham neighbour, the distinguished civil servant Henry Hardinge Cunynghame: 'We . . . were delighted with Athens and Corinth, and scarcely less so with Olympia' (MS. Getty Archives). From shipboard in the Mediterranean on the homeward leg he told the artist William Linnell: 'I have seen a boundless amount of beauty, the work both of Gods and man'. He wished he had more time left 'to employ my talents, such as they are in Art, better than ever before', and went on to reassure Linnell: 'When I speak of the limitation of age you will see that it is only in respect of the time left, not to the acuteness of perceptions and precision of hand which in truth I cannot regard as on the wane in any degree' (MS. private collection). A watercolour such as Athens endorses this assessment.
It was to be the fortieth work Hunt exhibited with the Royal (formerly Old) Society of Painters in Water Colours, and he resigned as an active member in June 1893, while it was still on display at 5a Pall Mall East. According to Cosmo Monkhouse, writing in the Academy, 'The landscapes, as usual, constitute the chief strength of the exhibition', and he welcomed Hunt's contributions as 'examples of serious purpose and intense individuality'. (Hunt's other submission, Sunset in the Val d'Arno, now in Johannesburg, dates from 1868.) The Illustrated London News commended Albert Goodwin's Venice, but felt that 'he cannot compete with Mr. Holman Hunt for originality of impression, for few people, we venture to think, ever carried away such a vivid idea of the sunset over Florence (106) or of the cypresses which guard the royal gardens (186) as are presented to us here'.
The important and elaborate gilt frame, almost certainly designed by the artist, is an indication of how highly he regarded Athens. It is characterized by a pattern of lotus-shaped leaves on the flat and a stencilled frieze of stylized dark grey leaves and white flowers on the cuff. The frieze appears to be based on Plate XVII, example no. 44, from that important source book for Hunt's frames, Owen Jones's The Grammar of Ornament (1856). This is entirely characteristic of Hunt's practice, since the plate, entitled 'Greek No. 3', is of 'Ornaments from Greek and Etruscan vases in the British Museum and the Louvre'.
Athens was inherited by Hunt's only daughter Gladys (Mrs Michael Joseph), who with her mother Edith had drawn up an (undated) inventory of 'the Works of W Holman Hunt at 18 Melbury Road'. Misled by Hunt’s aim to make his watercolour ‘rich and lustrous’ in appearance, it was classified as an oil painting and valued at 700 guineas (MS. private collection). Mrs Elisabeth Burt, who owned the work until 1993, was Mrs Joseph's daughter.
Athens is included in Judith Bronkhurst's, William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné (published by Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, 2006), volume II, No. D389, pp. 192-93 and Frame 19, p. 311. Dr Bronkhurst would like to acknowledge the help of the following in its preparation: the late Dr Ian Jenkins, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum, Miss Lynn Roberts, and Dr Philip Ward-Jackson, formerly of the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art.
This fine watercolour (referred to throughout the following text as Athens) with its unusual compositional format and sensitive observation of a Mediterranean night scene, was begun in the Greek capital in January 1892.
The previous year was one of success and stress for Holman Hunt. In June he had the gratification of seeing The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple fetch 3,400 guineas in these Rooms, and two months later Liverpool Corporation bought his latest major religious painting, The Triumph of the Innocents, for a similar sum. Meanwhile, his first major subject picture for some years, May Morning on Magdalen Tower (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), was being exhibited in a one-picture show in Old Bond Street. Finishing it had taken its toll on Hunt's health. His asthma became increasingly disabling, and on 13 November he wrote to his friend Vernon Lushington: 'I have been hindered more than once or twice from seeing you by this overworked body of mine failing me at critical junctures. . . Now you will have heard the doctor advises a holiday. And we are going shortly to make a tour more or less about the water which the gods made - it seems - to rear up, delight and strengthen willing men' (MS. private collection).
This poetic reaction to the Mediterranean and classical mythology may seem slightly unexpected. But Hunt had been imbued with enthusiasm for Greek culture from the 1840s, when, like all art students in London at that period, he had carefully studied the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum. In 1848, when Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti drew up their List of Immortals, Phidias was included, and in 1863, in his series of articles on Augustus Egg in the Reader, Hunt enthusiastically praised the sculptor's treatment of the goddesses in the Parthenon pediments. Homer was accorded two stars in the List of Immortals (only Shakespeare and the author of the book of Job got three, while Jesus Christ scored four), and was very much in the artist's mind when he had his first sight of the Greek Islands. This was on the final stages of his journey to the East of 1854-6, during a boat trip from Beirut to Constantinople. The vessel travelled close to the shore of Rhodes and the Island of Samos on 28 November 1855, inspiring Hunt to execute the watercolour In the Archipelago (private collection). Its calmness contrasts strongly with his excitement at passing a site he knew so well from Homer's Iliad: 'Yesterday I with my living eyes looked upon the plains of Troy - saw the tumuli of Ajax, Patroclus and Achilles - with Mount Ida standing up afar, clouded and dreaming away the day, as if remembering when the world was young . . .' This letter of 2 December to Michael Halliday (who in 1856 was to become Hunt's pupil and co-tenant) continues: 'a whole life time of my shadowy dreams on that head were made into realities thereby for ever' (MS. private collection).
Despite Hunt's love of classical culture, he was not concerned to translate his 'shadowy dreams on that head' into artistic realities in terms of subject matter. His reaction to the classical revival in British art which gained currency from the 1860s was a modification of his hard-edged Pre-Raphaelite style and a heightened appreciation of the decorative qualities of two-dimensional art. But he wished to base his reputation on major paintings that broke new ground in attempting to embody complex ideas in pictorial form. Only in one instance did his reverence for classical culture spill over into his paintings in a direct way. In 1891, the year the Mediterranean trip was planned, we find him designing a bas-relief of Hercules (Manchester Art Gallery) for inclusion in the work that was to occupy him for nearly twenty years, The Lady of Shalott (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford). The features of the classical hero appear to be based on a representation of Herakles fighting the Amazons in the frieze from the temple of Apollo Epikourios at Bassae, which Hunt could have seen in the British Museum.
At the end of 1891 Hunt and his wife Edith left London for their last trip to the East. After a fortnight's holiday in Alassio, the couple, newly refreshed, visited Genoa, Pisa, Lucca, Rome and Naples. On 14 January 1892 they travelled to Athens. According to the 1889 Baedeker, its population at the time, 'including the suburban villages', was about 85,000 (p. 36). All the better class hotels were in the Place de la Constitution, the centre then, as now, of the visitors' quarter. The Hunts may well have stayed at the luxurious Hotel Grande Bretagne, situated opposite what was then the Royal Palace (from 1935 the seat of the Greek Parliament). This huge edifice by the Bavarian architect Friedrich von Gärtner was erected in 1836-41 on rising ground east of Constitution (now Syndagma) Square. It is described in the Athens Blue Guide as 'a plain rectangle, built of broken limestone faced with cement, with numerous small windows' (1962, p. 13). Our watercolour was shown at the Birmingham Royal Society of Artists in 1893 with the title The Grand Square before the King's Palace, Athens, and Hunt must have been standing on the terrace directly in front of Gärtner's building. Light from its windows illuminates the gardens which are the principal focus of the composition. According to Baedeker, these were in the middle of the square and consisted of 'a velvety lawn, overhung by oranges, oleanders, and other southern trees' (op. cit., p. 45).
In 1895 Hunt exhibited his watercolour in Liverpool with the title The Grand Piazza at Athens, with the two bronze statues known as 'The Runners', of the time of Pericles. The athletes at the far right of the composition are copies of bronze statues from the Villa dei Papiri, Herculaneum. Hunt could have seen them in the Naples Archaeological Museum (inv. nos. 5626-7) just a few days before seeing the replicas in Athens (see R. Cantilena et. al., Le Collezioni del Museo Nazionale di Napoli, vol. II, Rome and Milan, 1989, nos. 158 and 159). These Roman statues were in turn copies of a Greek original dating from the end of the 4th century BC. The bronze figures positioned on the terrace in Hunt's watercolour look as though they are about to run out of the picture space, and are wittily juxtaposed with the living figures in the left foreground gesticulating in the direction of the Acropolis. The man in red is based on a study in a sketchbook of 1892, but Hunt has changed the colour of the jacket from blue to red to harmonize with the bright orange fruit on the trees in the garden.
This flexibility shows how far the artist was concerned to synthesize what Ruskin called the prosaic and poetic aspects of Pre-Raphaelitism. Hunt had long outgrown his obsession with painting everything, 'even the pebbles of the foreground from the place itself'. But he would surely have argued that Athens was a landscape that fulfilled his aim, as set forth in this letter of 12 August 1855 to W.M. Rossetti, 'to give you a truer notion of the thing'. He considered this an idea that 'naturally suggests itself to a painter in travelling unless he be entirely thoughtless' (MS. Huntington Library, San Marino). Hunt was never a thoughtless painter, and in Athens the 'truer notion of the thing' resides in his treatment of light. The dark sky lit by the bright stars so typical of the Mediterranean is juxtaposed with the light shining from the palace illuminating the foreground, areas of which Hunt has heightened with bodycolour. This exploration of the counterpoint of real and artificial light is part of a continuing process for the artist. The earliest, and most famous, instance is, of course, The Light of the World, but it is also an important feature of the subject pictures London Bridge on the Night of the Marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, 1863-6 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), and The Triumph of the Innocents. (Incidentally, the dog in the foreground of Athens is not dissimilar to the dogs in the background of that painting.) In terms of pure landscape, after The Thames at Chelsea, Evening, 1853 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), Hunt continued to explore such nocturnal light effects in watercolours executed in Egypt, Jerusalem (1854) and Florence (1867), and in The Terrace, Berne, by Moonlight (Rikjsprentenkabinet, Amsterdam). This was begun in 1875 from the Hunts' hotel bedroom window, and like Athens has a foreground illuminated from an unseen source.
The Hunts left Greece in early February 1892, and on 9 February Hunt wrote from Egypt to his Fulham neighbour, the distinguished civil servant Henry Hardinge Cunynghame: 'We . . . were delighted with Athens and Corinth, and scarcely less so with Olympia' (MS. Getty Archives). From shipboard in the Mediterranean on the homeward leg he told the artist William Linnell: 'I have seen a boundless amount of beauty, the work both of Gods and man'. He wished he had more time left 'to employ my talents, such as they are in Art, better than ever before', and went on to reassure Linnell: 'When I speak of the limitation of age you will see that it is only in respect of the time left, not to the acuteness of perceptions and precision of hand which in truth I cannot regard as on the wane in any degree' (MS. private collection). A watercolour such as Athens endorses this assessment.
It was to be the fortieth work Hunt exhibited with the Royal (formerly Old) Society of Painters in Water Colours, and he resigned as an active member in June 1893, while it was still on display at 5a Pall Mall East. According to Cosmo Monkhouse, writing in the Academy, 'The landscapes, as usual, constitute the chief strength of the exhibition', and he welcomed Hunt's contributions as 'examples of serious purpose and intense individuality'. (Hunt's other submission, Sunset in the Val d'Arno, now in Johannesburg, dates from 1868.) The Illustrated London News commended Albert Goodwin's Venice, but felt that 'he cannot compete with Mr. Holman Hunt for originality of impression, for few people, we venture to think, ever carried away such a vivid idea of the sunset over Florence (106) or of the cypresses which guard the royal gardens (186) as are presented to us here'.
The important and elaborate gilt frame, almost certainly designed by the artist, is an indication of how highly he regarded Athens. It is characterized by a pattern of lotus-shaped leaves on the flat and a stencilled frieze of stylized dark grey leaves and white flowers on the cuff. The frieze appears to be based on Plate XVII, example no. 44, from that important source book for Hunt's frames, Owen Jones's The Grammar of Ornament (1856). This is entirely characteristic of Hunt's practice, since the plate, entitled 'Greek No. 3', is of 'Ornaments from Greek and Etruscan vases in the British Museum and the Louvre'.
Athens was inherited by Hunt's only daughter Gladys (Mrs Michael Joseph), who with her mother Edith had drawn up an (undated) inventory of 'the Works of W Holman Hunt at 18 Melbury Road'. Misled by Hunt’s aim to make his watercolour ‘rich and lustrous’ in appearance, it was classified as an oil painting and valued at 700 guineas (MS. private collection). Mrs Elisabeth Burt, who owned the work until 1993, was Mrs Joseph's daughter.
Athens is included in Judith Bronkhurst's, William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné (published by Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, 2006), volume II, No. D389, pp. 192-93 and Frame 19, p. 311. Dr Bronkhurst would like to acknowledge the help of the following in its preparation: the late Dr Ian Jenkins, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum, Miss Lynn Roberts, and Dr Philip Ward-Jackson, formerly of the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art.