Page 76 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 76/206
William Holman Hunt: Self-Portrait (1867) + The Awakening Conscience (1853) + Amaryllis (1884).
Hunt was the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, coopting Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais in 1848. This plate illustrates something of the range of Hunt’s work over 30 years in the middle of the century. His masterpiece The Lady of Shallott was a late painting (1905) made when the PRB were already part of Victorian art history. Hunt was probably the most naturally gifted draughtsman of the three, and the range of his subject-matter echoed his Christian morality. The Awakening Conscience has been widely interpreted as the revelation of a ‘kept woman’ (the seated ‘gentleman’s’ mistress). Hunt was n orientalist - a visitor to Palestine and the Middle East (see Hunt: Self-Portrait - in Oriental clothes above left) The Scapegoat 1856), and a celebrator of a rather rustic Rural England (in Amryllis (1884), and in The Hireling Shepherd (1851). Amaryllis has a strangely fantastic, other-worldly air to it, a pagan pan-piping shepherdess with expensively inlaid ivory or bone pipes and Pre-Raphaelite red locks, an Easter bonnet, a look of wonder or spiritual detachment - not to say bliss - his paintings were visual poems in themselves.
Lucinda Hawksley on The Awakening Conscience: “While subjects taken from poetry and literature, in particular Shakespeare, Keats and Tennyson, remained favourite sources for Pre Raphaelite paintings, in the 1850s a number of artists tried their hand at subjects from modern life. Perhaps the best known of these works is Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853), in which a young woman is seen rising from the lap of a whiskered young man. Exhibited at the RA in 1854, the critics could not agree as to the subject of the painting. The fact that the artist had painted the pattern on the carpet with as much care as the face of the young woman and her lover, suggested to some that Hunt’s only aim was illusionistic imitation. Not so, claimed John Ruskin in another letter to The Times in which he identified the subject as a kept woman and her lover: ‘There is not a single object in that room - common, modern, vulgar - but it becomes tragical, if rightly read... the torn and dieing bird upon the floor, the gilded tapestry... the picture above the fireplace, with its single drooping figure - the woman taken in adultery, nay the very hem of the poor girl’s dress - has a story in it, if we think how soon its pure whiteness may be soiled by dust and rain, her outcast feet failing in the street... I surely need not go on?’” Hawksley: Essential Pre-Raphaelites: (1999).
The model is Annie Miller - a girl age 15 from a Chelsea slum - whom Hunt had helped with the cost of her education - raising her ‘above her station’. Before Hunt left for the Holy Land in 1854, he had intended on his return to marry her - but he did not.