Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

Figure 7. William Holman Hunt, Valen­
tine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (Two
Gentlemen of Verona), 1851. Courtesy if
the Birmingham Museums and Art Callery,
Birmingham, England. This is the painting
Hunt was working on when he described the
wet-ground technique ill his autobiography (I,
276) : "The heads of Va lentine alld if Prote­
us, the hands if these figures, and the bright­
er costumes in the same painting had been
executed in this way .... In the country we
had used it, so fa r, mainly fo r blossoms of
flowers, fo r which it was singularly valuable. "
Pa int daubs if van'ous mixtures of red are
visible on the spandrels.

162

Pre-Raphaelite painters and never to any great extent. The myth of the Pre­

Raphaelite technique arose from a single paragraph in Hunt's 1,000-page,

two-volume autobiography. Citing as an example the painting Valentine Res­

cuing Sylvia from Proteus (Fig. 7), Hunt stated that he would (13):

Select a prepared ground, originally Jor its brightness, and renovate it, if

necessary, with Jr esh white when first it comes into the studio, white to be

mixed with a very little amber or copal varnish. Let this last coat become

oj a thoroughly stone-like hardness. Upon this suiface complete with ex­

actness the outline oj the part in hand. On the morning Jor the painting,

with Jr esh white (from which all supeifluous oil has been extracted by means

oj absorbent paper, and to which a small drop oj varnish has been added)

spread a Jurther coat very evenly with a palette knife over the part Jor the

day's work, oj such consistency that the drawing should Jaintly show

through. In some cases the thickened white may be applied to the Jorms

needing brilliancy with a brush, by the aid oj rectified spirits. Over this

wet ground, the colour (transparent and semi-transparent) should be laid

with light sable brushes, and the touches must be made so tenderly that

the ground below shall not be worked up, yet so Jar enticed to blend with

the superimposed tints as to correct the qualities oj thinness and staininess

[sic], which over a dry ground transparent colours used would inevitably

exhibit. Painting oj this kind ca nnot be retouched except with an entire

loss oj luminosity.

In spite of the attention given to this quotation, however, it is rarely pointed

out that Hunt describes this as a technique with which he experimented at

one point in his career, used fo r specific design areas rather than entire can­

vases and not as a wholesale working method, as has been interpreted. Indeed,

until the appearance of the autobiography in 1905, Hunt appears to repudiate

his early experimental technique. It remains unmentioned in his first version

of his memoirs, nor does it crop up in the frequent handwritten inscriptions

in which he recorded details of technique on bare sections of canvas or sup­

port (14) (Fig. 8). Hunt dismisses its relevance to his career in an article on

his painting technique that appeared in the magazine Porifolio in 1875, stating

that he used wet grounds only from 1850 to 1854 to capture the effects of

sunlight (15). While these five early years are viewed today as Hunt's period

of greatest productivity and success, to his contemporaries his highest achieve­

ments came later in a career that spanned seven decades (16).

The sudden prominence accorded to the technique in 1905, may be due not

to Hunt himself, but to his wife, Edith, seeking to enhance his reputation

through the implication of technical innovation. Suffering from glaucoma,

Hunt dictated much of his memoir to Edith who, according to their grand­

daughter, among others, took liberties with the text, "deleting passages ...

she considered unsuitable fo r posterity" (author's emphasis) (17). Edith's urge

to improve went so far as taking advantage of her husband's blindness to have

a studio assistant repaint Hunt's portrait of her, secretly slimming her waist

and reddening her lips (18). It may well have been at her suggestion that the

wet-ground technique, after fifty years of oblivion, abruptly became of im­

portance in her husband's career, serving as one more opportunity to assert

his innovation, skill, and pivotal role in the movement he had helped to shape.

Along with the disproportionate attention given to the Pre-Raphaelite tech­

nique comes a misunderstanding of the technique itself, due to a fu ndamental

misreading of the word "ground." In Hunt's writings, the term often refers

to an imprimatura, or underpaint, layer, rather than the intermediary priming

that prepares a solid or fabric support to receive paint. In his diary, fo r ex­

ample, Hunt refers to "lay[ing] a new ground fo r the left shoulder, which I

do of white, cobalt green, and cadmium" (19). Further investigation confirms

that Hunt's "wet ground" was actually a layer of paint, the "fresh white" of

his writings referring to flake white oil paint, as he indicated in a letter of

1878 (20):

Historical Painting Tech niques, Materials, and Studio Practice