William Holman Hunt, O.M., R.W.S. (London 1827-1910)

Portrait of Charles Allston Collins

Details

William Holman Hunt, O.M., R.W.S. (London 1827-1910)
Portrait of Charles Allston Collins
dated 'July 1852' (lower left)
pencil
9¼ x 8¼ in. (23.5 x 21 cm.)

Provenance

By descent in the family of the artist to
Diana Holman-Hunt, his grand-daughter.
with The Maas Gallery, London.

Literature

G. Reynolds, 'The Pre-Raphaelites and their Circle', Apollo, June 1971, p. 498, fig. 11. J. Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt, A Catalogue Raisonné, Newhaven and London, 2006, vol. II, p. 40, no. D63, illustrated.

Exhibited

Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, and London, Victoria & Albert Museum, William Holman Hunt, 1969, no. 126.
King's Lynn, Fermoy Art Gallery, The Pre-Raphaelites as Painters and Draughtsmen, 1971, no. 42.

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Lot Essay

Charles Allston Collins (1828-1873) was the son of the landscape painter William Collins and the younger brother of Wilkie Collins, the novelist. Though a close associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly intimate with Millais, he was never actually a member. Despite some success, in the later 1850s he abandoned painting for writing, and in 1860 he married Kate Dickens, the novelist's youngest daughter.

Judith Bronkhurst observes that the drawing was made at about the time Hunt started to talk of going to the East, and 'may therefore have been undertaken for its memento value'.

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