Alfred William Hunt was born in Liverpool on 15 November 1830, son of the landscape painter, Andrew Hunt. Taking lessons from his father, and absorbing the influence of both his father’s friend, David Cox, and J M W Turner, he exhibited from the age of 12. Blessed with academic and artistic talents, he studied at Liverpool Collegiate School and Oxford (from 1848) with the intention of entering the Church. He won the Newdigate Prize for English Verse (1851) and became a Fellow of Corpus Christi College (1853).
For a while he suspended the necessity of taking holy orders, and pursued academic and artistic careers in tandem; he exhibited at the Royal Academy (from 1854) and was elected to the Liverpool Academy (an associate in 1854, and a member two years later).
During this period, Hunt began to read the work of Ruskin, and became so inspired by its aesthetic of ‘Truth to Nature’ as to develop his art as a synthesis of its Turnerian and Pre-Raphaelite elements. His growing emulation of Turner can clearly be seen in his love of atmospherics, and in the experimental techniques that he employed to achieve them. His loyalty to Pre-Raphaelitism can be understood through the almost scientifically detailed studies he made in preparation for painting. His membership of the Hogarth Club (1858) also demonstrated Pre-Raphaelite affiliations. As a result of these endeavours, he gained and sustained Ruskin’s praise, and became his friend and correspondent.
Hunt’s dedication to landscape painting also revealed itself in the extensive summer tours that he began to take at this time. He frequently visited the northern counties of England, North Wales and Scotland. He increasingly travelled through Europe – to France, Switzerland, Italy and Greece – and beyond, to Turkey and the Holy Land.
In 1861, Hunt decided to marry and, in so doing, left the university for Durham, his wife’s native town, and devoted himself fully to watercolour painting. A year later he was elected to the Society of Painters in Water Colours (associate 1862, member 1864), soon becoming a prime mover in raising its status in the art world. On settling in London, in 1865, he took over the Campden Hill studio of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, William Holman Hunt, who was leaving for the Holy Land. He then exhibited mainly at the OWS, where fellow artists and perceptive connoisseurs appreciated him more properly than did members of the general public. He helped engineer the honorary membership of Ruskin to the society (1873) and served as its Vice-President (1880). (The society was renamed the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1881). His developing reputation was marked, in 1893, by the inclusion of a group of his works in the World Exhibition in Chicago which he attended. He died in London on 3 May 1896.
His work is represented in numerous public collections, including Tate; and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford).
In Alfred William Hunt certain of the influences of mid and late nineteenth century landscape painting merge, and occasionally contradict one another, to produce work of beauty and quality which has great character. At an early age he came into contact with David Cox, whose influence may be seen in Hunt's first works. The theoretical influence of Ruskin is felt in Hunt's work through the eighteen-sixties, but his first mature style was also derived from the Pre-Raphaelite landscape paintings that he had seen in the eighteen-fifties, and also importantly from the study of Turner's watercolours. To what extent Ruskin was the medium for each of these influences is hard to analyse but what is clear is that Hunt's reaction to these influences increasingly disappointed Ruskin. One may assume that Ruskin found Hunt somewhat too independent in his approach to accept him as the ideal disciple. Hunt's work in the eighteen-fifties and sixties is occasionally purely Pre-Raphaelite in spirit with its minute depiction of foreground detail and its overall use of pure bright colour.
Later in the artist's life, and consistently from the eighteen-seventies, his style tended to become broader and his effects more atmospheric. Even so he continued to achieve these ends by means of close stippling. Hunt's landscapes are distinct from those of his fellow 'Pre-Raphaelite, George Price Boyce, for example, because of Hunt's following of the early English watercolour tradition, which encouraged a degree of organisation of the elements of a landscape to achieve picturesque atmosphere, rather than the objective recording of the landscape as it was found.
Christopher Newall
Further reading
Christopher Newall, ‘Hunt, Alfred William (1830-1896)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 28, page 834; Christopher Newall, The Poetry of Truth. Alfred William Hunt and the Art of Landscape, Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2004; Scott Wilcox, ‘Hunt, Alfred William (b Liverpool, 15 Nov 1830; d London, 3 May 1896)’, Jane Turner (ed), The Dictionary of Art, London: Macmillan, 1996, vol 15, page 24
