William Holman Hunt's Portrait of Fanny: inspiration for the artist in the late 1860s

• Autores: Caroline Igra
• Localización: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, ISSN 0044-2992, Vol. 65, Nº. 2, 2002, págs. 232-241
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • The writer discusses the significance of William Holman Hunt's Portrait of Fanny, a portrait of his first wife now in The Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio. Fanny died of cholera not quite one year after her marriage to Hunt, on December 20, 1866. Although their marriage was quite short, it determined the direction of his work in the period from 1865 to the years immediately following; the paintings from the period 1865–68 show that the bereft widower was actively attempting to record Fanny's physical, and then spiritual, presence within his life. In Portrait of Fanny, which Hunt intended as a remembrance for his son Cyril, he creates the illusion that Fanny herself, her lips and cheeks reflecting the blue pallor of death, is standing before us. The work was not merely his attempt to capture Fanny's photographic image for posterity, however; rather, it was an attempt to memorialize the effect of her death on Hunt. With its careful manipulation of realism and symbolism, it is a memorial both to life and to the inevitability of death.