William Henry HUNT

This watercolour may have been done during one of William Henry Hunt’s winters in the coastal town of Hastings, where the artist went for his health during the early part of his career, and where he spent much time sketching out of doors. As the 19th century poet and critic William Cosmo Monkhouse has written of Hunt, ‘Some of his best landscapes were also painted at Hastings, which he visited regularly for thirty years, taking up his residence in a small house in the old town overlooking the beach...He was debarred by his infirmity from active exercise, and in later years his health prevented him from drawing in the open air. Many, if not most, of his landscapes were drawn from windows.’

In his 1982 monograph on the artist, Sir John Witt noted of Hunt that ‘in his early impressionable days [he] was steeped in the spirit of the eighteenth century, and in his early landscapes and views of churches, many done with reed pen and watercolour, and others in pure watercolour, his best qualities as an artist can be seen. He possessed an innate and unobtrusive sense of composition which never deserted him. There is a liveliness and spontaneity in these early landscapes and in his seascapes and shore scenes around Hastings which he gradually lost as he came in his later years, and for good financial reasons, to concentrate on plums and grapes and birds’ nests. These early works which have only recently begun to become widely known and appreciated should rank far higher in the hierarchy of nineteenth-century watercolours…for the present writer, Hunt’s finest and most memorable works are his early landscapes…These by their directness and unerring sense of composition best convey Hunt’s passionate love of nature and his skill in portraying it in loving and simple terms. His talents as an all-round watercolourist deserve a far greater and wider recognition than they have hitherto been accorded.’

The art dealer Cyril Fry (1918-2010) specialized in 18th and 19th century British works on paper and worked from a gallery in London between 1967 and 1986, and later in Aldeburgh in Suffolk.