William Holman Hunt

William Holman Hunt was the only founding Pre-Raphaelite who kept to the programme for his whole life, and he went to the Dead Sea to paint a goat. He was a warehouse clerk's son who forced his way into the Royal Academy schools, and in 1848 he founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the principle that painting had gone wrong with Raphael and should return to direct observation, hard colour and moral seriousness. Millais drifted to fashionable portraiture and Rossetti to dreams; Hunt did not move. The Light of the World, painted in a garden at night by lamplight, became one of the most reproduced religious images in the English-speaking world and toured the colonies to enormous crowds. He made four journeys to Palestine from 1854, working from the actual landscape and actual models on the ground that a biblical subject should be painted where it happened - The Scapegoat was painted on the shore of the Dead Sea with a real goat that died. His late memoir is the founding account of the Brotherhood and is heavily slanted towards his own role. He was nearly blind at the end and dictated. The Awakening Conscience, painted as a secular companion to The Light of the World, shows a kept woman rising from her protector s knee and was misunderstood at the time until Ruskin explained it in a letter to The Times. Hunt married Fanny Waugh, and after her death married her sister Edith, which was illegal in England and required the ceremony to be held in Switzerland. His model Annie Miller was a source of long trouble between him and Rossetti. He received the Order of Merit in 1905 and is buried in St Paul s.

• Lived: 1827 CE – 1910 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: artist