id: 153206 accession number: 1986.18 share license status: CC0 url: https://clevelandart.org/art/1986.18 updated: 2023-03-14 12:01:30.467000 Study for "The Hireling Shepherd", 1851. William Holman Hunt (British, 1827–1910). Graphite; sheet: 11.4 x 18.3 cm (4 1/2 x 7 3/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Delia E. Holden Fund 1986.18 title: Study for "The Hireling Shepherd" title in original language: series: series in original language: creation date: 1851 creation date earliest: 1851 creation date latest: 1851 current location: creditline: Delia E. Holden Fund copyright: --- culture: England, 19th century technique: graphite department: Drawings collection: DR - British type: Drawing find spot: catalogue raisonne: Bronkhurst D55 --- CREATORS * William Holman Hunt (British, 1827–1910) - artist Holman Hunt exhibited an early aptitude for art, which his father, a warehouse manager, initially opposed but later tolerated. Between 1839 and 1843 he practiced drawing and studied with the portrait painter Henry Rogers while sustaining himself as an office clerk. Hunt met John Everett Millais (1829-1896) the same year that he entered the Royal Academy Schools, 1844. A decisive conversion in his attitude toward art came with the reading of John Ruskin's Modern Painters in 1847, immediately after which he embarked on a new style of conscientious naturalism in The Flight of Madeline and Porphyro During the Drunkenness Attending the Revelry (Guildhall, London), a picture inspired by John Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes. Hunt, Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), who were sharing studios, organized the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of His Younger Brother (private collection), Hunt's only picture to be shown publicly with the inscription "P.R.B." was exhibited at the Royal Academy the following summer. With its landscape painted directly from nature, its stylistic allusions to Quattrocento painting, and its medieval subject, Rienzi epitomized the Brotherhood's objectives of reinstating the moral and descriptive honesty of earlier Italian and Flemish painting. The brilliant coloring and crisp light of plein-air painting and an increasing deployment of symbolic details characterize Hunt's other early masterworks, A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Priest from the Persecution of the Druids (1850, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1851, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery), and the abstrusely moralizing Hireling Shepherd (1851, Manchester City Art Galleries). In 1854, after having finished what would ultimately be his most popular image, The Light of the World (Kebble College, Oxford), Hunt voyaged to the Holy Land where he spent two years traveling from Cairo to Beirut. His intent was to paint religious subjects with archaeological precision. The typology of The Scapegoat (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), much of which was painted on-site near the Dead Sea, proved too unintelligible for the general public when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1856, but it remains a work of poignant genius. Subsequent trips to the Holy Land in 1869-72 and 1875-78 resulted in two of his finest late works, The Shadow of Death (1870-73, Manchester City Art Gallery) and The Triumph of the Innocents (1876-87, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool). Much of Hunt's final years were devoted to writing, especially after his eyesight began to fail in the 1890s, although he managed to finish in 1905, after nearly two decades of labor, his last great picture, The Lady of Shalott (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford). --- measurements: Sheet: 11.4 x 18.3 cm (4 1/2 x 7 3/16 in.) state of the work: edition of the work: support materials: description: off-white laid paper watermarks: * WDNEY'S inscriptions: inscription: inscribed, in graphite, on verso, at lower edge: Sketch for figures in Hireling Shepherd; in graphite, on verso, at center of sheet: First Drawing Hireling Shepherd Pale Cream Mt o Linen same as Scapegoat o Frame same translation: remark: --- CURRENT EXHIBITIONS title: Year in Review for 1986 opening date: 1987-02-04T05:00:00 Year in Review for 1986. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 4-March 15, 1987). title: British Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art opening date: 2013-02-10T00:00:00 British Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art . The Cleveland Museum of Art (organizer) (February 10-May 26, 2013). --- LEGACY EXHIBITIONS * An Exhibition of Drawings by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown. Portsmouth City Museum (1976). * William Holman Hunt. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (March 25 - April 29, 1969). * The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-1861). Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery (June 7 - July 27, 1947). * Loan Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings of the 1860 Period. National Gallery, London (April 27 - June 29, 1923). --- PROVENANCE The artist's family, by descent date: 1910-? footnotes: citations: Mrs. Elisabeth Burt date: ?-probably 1985 footnotes: citations: (sale, Sotheby's, London, October 10, 1985, no. 15) date: 1985 footnotes: citations: (Peter Nahum, Ltd., London, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH) date: 1985-1986 footnotes: citations: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH date: 1986- footnotes: citations: --- fun fact: Contemporary viewers would have recognized the painting for which this drawing is a study as bearing a deeper meaning: the couple's risky flirtation will lead to disastrous consequences and the shepherd ignores his flock while distracted by romance. digital description: Together with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt was one of the founding members in 1848 of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young artists who rejected the heavy darkness and idealization of academic history painting, replacing it with meticulously observed, jewel-colored naturalistic detail. This is a study for the figures in the oil painting The Hireling Shepherd, Hunt’s first commercial success. The poses of the couple in the painting are remarkably close to the early study: the shepherd approaches the shepherdess upon his knees, encircling her shoulders with his arm. Devoid of extraneous detail, the study concentrates on the romantic play and erotic tension expressed by the lovers’ intertwined limbs and faces and hands that stop just short of touching. wall description: Together with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais, Hunt was one of the founding members in 1848 of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of young artists who rejected the heavy darkness and idealization of academic history painting, replacing it with meticulously observed, jewel-colored naturalistic detail. This is a study for the figures in the oil painting The Hireling Shepherd, Hunt’s first commercial success. The poses of the couple in the painting are remarkably close to the early study: the shepherd approaches the shepherdess upon his knees, encircling her shoulders with his arm. Devoid of extraneous detail, the study concentrates on the romantic play and erotic tension expressed by the lovers’ intertwined limbs and faces and hands that stop just short of touching. --- RELATED WORKS --- CITATIONS Hunt, William Holman. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 2nd rev. ed. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1914. page number: Reproduced: vol. 1, p. 189 url: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044034121129 Loan Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings of the 1860 Period. Exh. Cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1923. page number: Mentioned: p. 28, no. 148 url: The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-1861). Exh. Cat. Birmingham: Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, 1947. page number: Mentioned: p. 32, no. 151 url: William Holman Hunt. Exh. Cat. Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery, 1969. page number: Mentioned: p. 32, no. 151 url: An Exhibition of Drawings by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown. Exh. Cat. Portsmouth: Portsmouth City Museum and Art Gallery, 1976. page number: Mentioned: p. 12, no. 13 url: Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1986." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 74, no. 2 (1987): 38-79. page number: Mentioned and reproduced: p. 69, no. 151 url: www.jstor.org/stable/25159974 Bronkhurst, Judith. William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. page number: Mentioned and reproduced: vol. 2, p. 35, no. D55 url: Lemonedes, Heather. British Drawings: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Exh. Cat. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2013. page number: Mentioned: pp. 96-97, 146, no. 32; Reproduced: p. 97 url: --- IMAGES web: https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1986.18/1986.18_web.jpg print: https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1986.18/1986.18_print.jpg full: https://openaccess-cdn.clevelandart.org/1986.18/1986.18_full.tif