William Holman Hunt

Hunt was born on 2 April 1827 above his father's warehouse near Cheapside in London, the son of a warehouse manager. He attended private schools until about age thirteen, then worked as a copying clerk while taking evening drawing classes and studying privately with the portrait painter Henry Rogers. By 1843 he had given up commercial work to study full time, copying at the British Museum and the National Gallery. He entered the Royal Academy Schools as a probationer in 1844 and became a full student in 1845, where he met Millais, who introduced him to Rossetti.

In 1848 the three formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, rejecting the conventions of academic painting in favor of close observation of nature, bright color, and literary or moral subject matter. Hunt exhibited A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids at the Royal Academy in 1850, and over the following decades produced the works for which he is best known: The Hireling Shepherd, The Awakening Conscience, The Light of the World, The Scapegoat, and, later, The Shadow of Death and The Lady of Shalott. He traveled repeatedly to the Middle East to paint religious subjects on location, a practice central to his conception of realism.

In 1905 he received the Order of Merit and an honorary Doctor of Civil Law from the University of Oxford. He held one-man exhibitions in London, Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow in 1906 and 1907. Hunt died on 7 September 1910 in London and, according to Wikipedia, was buried at St Paul's Cathedral.

Hunt's early work drew sharp, sometimes hostile criticism for its unconventional color and detail before the Pre-Raphaelite approach gained wider acceptance in the 1850s. His reputation cooled through the later nineteenth and much of the twentieth century as academic Victorian painting fell out of critical favor, before a documented rehabilitation of Pre-Raphaelite painting took hold, marked by the 1969 loan exhibition shared between the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the Victoria and Albert Museum. That renewed institutional interest culminated in Sin and Salvation: William Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, a retrospective of more than sixty works organized with the Art Gallery of Ontario and Manchester Art Gallery and shown at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2009, its sole United States venue. No exact, attributable critical quotation could be confirmed for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Hunt's market is defined by scarcity rather than turnover. Most of his major canvases are held permanently by museums, including Tate, Manchester Art Gallery, the Lady Lever Art Gallery, and, in the United States, the Art Institute of Chicago, which leaves relatively few significant works available to trade. His auction high is Isabella and the Pot of Basil, sold from the Delaware Art Museum at Christie's London on 17 June 2014; the hammer price was GBP 2,500,000, about USD 4.25 million, and the total price including premium was reported at close to USD 4.89 million, then a record for a work by Hunt at auction. There is no gallery or estate currently representing Hunt or managing his market; sales run through major auction houses.

There is no catalogue raisonne of Hunt's work and no estate or foundation managing authentication, so provenance, exhibition history, and institutional documentation carry the weight that a catalogue raisonne would otherwise carry. Because so many of his major paintings are permanently held by museums, the pool of tradable works is small and any single auction result, including the 2014 record for Isabella and the Pot of Basil, should be read as an isolated data point rather than part of a dense price series. Collectors considering a Hunt work should place particular weight on documented ownership history and past exhibition or loan records rather than on auction-market trend lines, which do not exist in any statistically meaningful sense for this artist.