William Holman Hunt: Painter, painting, paint

Quite well researched and written. I had purchased it assuming it would be filled with color plates, so I was disappointed.

This is an academic text. It reads like someone's doctoral thesis, and may have been that in an earlier incarnation. All of Hunt's major paintings are reproduced here, but in low quality on matte paper, intended only to help illuminate the text. This is a book written for and directed to an academic audience, and few others will find it useful.WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT: PAINTER, PAINTING, PAINT suffers from the usual maladies of post-modern academic writing. Citation and quotation substitute for genuine thought and reason. The author's psychological inability to accept any form of "truth" or "falsehood" results in a continuous, mind killing dither from position to position and theme to theme, never resting firmly enough to be pinned down. Anyone who has been through a liberal arts education in the past twenty years will understand what I mean. If you had enough of that in college, this is not the book for you. If you are working on your Ph.D on Pre-Raphaelitism, on the other hand, then this book is an essential! [but, if so, you probably know that already]I am mystified by Jacobi's premise that Hunt's paintings are unattractive, "ugly", or aesthetically eccentric. Perhaps this is the traditional academic view and Jacobi is bound by her profession to respond to it, but Hunt's work has always been popular and considered beautiful by lay audiences. I am no art scholar, only a man among the plebeian crowd, but I find Hunt's paintings unimpeachably gorgeous. One suspects many academics' real issue with Hunt is/was not aesthetic at all, but ideological. He was one of those boring Christian-idealist types... "Oh, the horror!"The most interesting part of the book was Jacobi's chapter on Hunt's painting materials and techniques, which any Hunt fan would enjoy.I give this book three out of five stars, if only because it is a whole substantial volume about William Holman Hunt. There aren't enough of those. And he's my favorite.

Jacobi "attempt[s] to rationalise Hunt's problematic aesthetic." One English art writer said of the Victorian-era/pre-Raphaelite English artist Hunt's works that they "are not good-looking." "Garish," "crude," "sharp and severe" are other terms that have been applied to Hunt's paintings. Jacobi does not disagree that such descriptions apply. But seeing that Hunt was a skilled painter with technical command, was self consciousness about the subjects he chose and the style he applied, and had a sharp eye (some have said he could see the moons of Jupiter with his naked eye), she looks more deeply into Hunt's works for the psychological, cultural, and religious bases of them. Basically, the lecturer and teacher of art and visual studies at two English educational institutions finds that Hunt's "anachronistic" Christian beliefs "impelled him to test the extremities of his art against modern circumstance." Working from the mid 1800s to the first years of the 1900s, the religiously-minded Hunt experienced an ineluctable modernism to make paintings that "are not failed imaginings of a comfortable middlebrow fantasy, but successful investigations of uncomfortable, not wholly controllable, individual actuality." While Jacobi's acute, multi-sided study (as the subtitle suggests) does not presume to elevate Hunt beyond his standing as a particularly interesting nineteenth-century English artist, it does discern and clearly define challenges Hunt presents to art historians and critics; and does resolve the primary ones through extensive biographical research, historical and sociological study of the period, and expert art critic skills, understandings, and insights.

I was really disappointed in the photographs of William Holman Hunt in the book. A lot of them were in black and white! Those that were shown were small and did not in the least do Hunt's work any justice. The author could have given a precis of Hunt's life and work but she maintained that other people have already done this, including Hunt in an autobiography.I bought the book after viewing some of Hunt's work at Manchester art gallery, and I fell in love with his style - the amount of work that must have gone into each painting is phenominal.I would have appreciated more information about the book's content, especially an example of the photography before buying the book.

nice cover - and there the accolades end! Buy something that focuses on the artwork and spares you some conjectural diatribes on motives the author or anyone else not over the age of around 150 cannot possibly know for sure!