Matthew Dennison

Distinctive vision

Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision<br /> <em>Manchester Art Gallery, until 11 January 2009</em><br /> <br type="_moz" />

Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision
Manchester Art Gallery, until 11 January 2009


Needlepoint nose-dived during the 19th century. This came about, like so many errors of taste, through a process of democratisation. The ladylike pursuit of the leisured classes penetrated the parlours of the many. In place of hand-drawn designs devised by the stitcher, mass-produced penny pattern sheets overflowed the haberdasher’s stall. Berlin woolwork planted its beefy cabbage roses across a nation’s bell pulls and tea cosies. Facilitated by new synthetic dyes, it did so in a dazzlingly gaudy palette.

In his vigorous love of colour and determined Pre-Raphaelite focus on every leaf and bud of nature, William Holman Hunt created a painter’s take on the quintessentially Victorian brilliance of Berlin woolwork. Even his contemporaries occasionally doubted his eye. In 1856, the Art Journal questioned whether the mountains of Edom, glimpsed across the Dead Sea in Hunt’s ‘The Scapegoat’, were really the Day-Glo striations of lilac, crimson and egg-yolk yellow the painter offered his viewers. Hunt himself described the landscape he reproduced with painstaking diligence as ‘so extraordinary a scene of beautifully arranged horrible wilderness’, and it is clear that, in part, the public agreed with this assessment. Perhaps his eye misled him. He was forced to abandon his encampment by the hostile attentions of local tribesmen and finish the painting in London, far away from the sultry fluorescence of Palestine.

The paler light of home did nothing to dampen Hunt’s palette. ‘The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple’, partly drawn from life on the same trip to the Holy Lands in which he worked on ‘The Scapegoat’, partly finished through visits to the Alhambra Court of the Crystal Palace, then relocated to Sydenham, is just as brightly coloured.

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