The Caprine Curiosity of the Passionate Pre-Raphaelite

nWillie loved Annie but Anniendidn’t love Willie.

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nWillie was William Holman Hunt,nthe third of the original Pre-Raphaelite triumvirate. Unlike Millais, henstruggled to gain entry to the Royal Academy Schools, but his painting ThenEve of St Agnes so impressed Rossetti that he sought him out and madenfriends with him. Just as Rossetti had fallen for the model Elizabeth Siddal,nHunt fell for Annie Miller, another model he first saw working as a barmaid.nAlthough stunningly beautiful, Miller lived in poverty, dressed in rags, hernhair was infested with lice, she was totally illiterate and swore like antrooper. In the true spirit of Victorian philanthropy, the Pygmalion Hunt setnabout ‘bettering’ Miller, buying her clothes and teaching her the alphabet andnmanners. 

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nHunt’s paintings were either didactically moral or overtly religious;nan example of the former is The Awakening Conscience, which featuresnMiller. A ‘fallen’ woman realises her mistake and rises from her lover’s lap,nher face aglow with the revelation of her folly. The Victorians would have readnthe painting like a book as every detail indicates the magnitude of hernmistake. The furnishing of the room would have been instantly recognizable asnthat of the vulgar nouveau riche, bought not inherited furniture;neverything is flash, cheap and nasty. He is a cad and a bounder of the worst water, with his silly dundreary whiskers, vile stripy trousers and ghastlyntaste in ornaments. The other details in the painting also speak for themselvesn– the glove tossed aside, the cat playing with the bird, the clock covered bynthe dome, the unfinished tapestry – it is all too plain to see what’s beenngoing on, and none of it is good. 

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nMiller, weirdly, was also the face of Christnin The Light of the World (1854) but Hunt was dissatisfied with hisnreligious works and resolved to travel to the Holy Land, to research thendetails properly and to use authentic settings. He left a list of artists whonAnnie would be allowed to sit for; Millais, yes, Rossetti, absolutely not! In thenHoly Land, Hunt produced some of the strangest paintings ever made by thenVictorians. 

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nHis wonderful The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple is anmasterpiece of Orientalism and made Hunt a fortune; he exhibited it in antravelling exhibition in England, selling engravings and explanatory pamphlets,nand he sold the original for a mind-numbing £5,000 (a domestic servant earnednabout £10 per year). 

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nBut strangest of all is The Scapegoat (1856) whichnmay well be the oddest work of Art ever painted. Hunt travelled to Oosdoom (thensite of Sodom) on the shore of the Dead Sea, where in the briny, desolatenwasteland he tethered a white goat to a post and proceeded to paint it. Whennone died, he bought another and carried on. He sat on a travelling stool withnbrush and palette and with a rifle balanced beneath one arm and a pistol in hisnbelt, as the Latin and Greek churches were at odds as to who should repair thenroof of the Holy Sepulchre, an argument which had drawn in the governments ofnBritain, France, Russia and Turkey and threatened to break out into all outnwar. And out in the wilds, a mad Englishman was painting a goat, with thenpurple mountains of Moab in the distance. The subject came from an obscurenJudaic practice mentioned in Leviticus 16:21, where a goat is sent out into thenwilderness taking with it the sins of the people. 

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nWhen he got it home, everyonenwas flummoxed. His hard-headed dealer, Gambart, asked what it was, andnpatiently Hunt tried to explain the story of the Scapegoat to the incredulousnFrenchman. It was, he said, a story from the Bible, an important book to thenEnglish, so Gambart sent for his English wife and her friend, who thought Yes,nit was a goat and they asked Hunt when he was going to paint in the restnof the flock. The Art world was equally baffled. The Art Journal thoughtnthe work might most usefully hung in the Museum of the Zoological Gardens, the Athenaeumnthought the goat was ‘… but a goat’, and the Times deemed it ‘…annexcellent portrait of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.’ 

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nBack in London in 1856,nHunt was dismayed to find that Annie had been sitting for Rossetti (and maybenmore …) and then discovered she was also involved with the notorious womanisernthe Seventh Earl of Ranelagh. He proposed to her but then broke off thatnengagement – Ranelagh urged her to sue for breach of promise. Eventually AnnienMiller married Ranelagh’s cousin, Captain Thomas Thomson; she died, aged 90, inn1925. 

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nIn 1862, Hunt got married, an occasion that gets one line in hisnautobiography, “It was at this time that I married Miss Waugh.” FannynWaugh is a shadowy figure about whom we know next to nothing. Again in hisnautobiography, Hunt records that his wife was ill when they were travelling innItaly and the next near-mention says, “In September of the next year Inreturned to England with my motherless child.” And that’s it. No details.nNo explanation. 

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nShe had posed for one of his most beautiful paintings Isabella,nor the Pot of Basil. It is the same subject as Millais’s earlier work Lorenzonand Isabella, but later in that story. Taken from the Keats’ poem of thensame name, Isabella is the tale of her love for Lorenzo, who is murderednin an honour-killing by her disapproving brothers. Isabella takes her deadnlover’s head and hides it in a pot of basil, which she daily waters with herntears. 

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nAnd it gets weirder. Hunt’s next act was to marry Edith, the sister ofnhis dead wife, for which they had to travel abroad, as this was an act ofnincest under English law. This caused the expected ripples in English society,nand in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood too, not least because the sculptornThomas Woolner had loved Fanny from afar and had married a third sister, Alice.nNevertheless, he was appointed to the Order of Merit by Edward VII in 1905, andndied five years later, in 1910, aged 83.

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