Tag Archives: William Holman Hunt

eccentric tastes and watchful wife…

The hidden. The unknowable. The unthinkable. Sir Richard Francis Burton. The first great anti-hero…. As a lieutenant in the British army in India, he had nothing but contempt for his fellow officers who remained aloof and indifferent to the exotic … Continue reading

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the coxcombs move on

The late Victorian period for the Royal Academy was really the end , succumbing after a long and chronic respiratory illness. Frith’s The Private View from 1881, showed that the Summer Exhibition could still take a hold on the public, … Continue reading

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conspicuous posturing

The lessons we learn today from Victorian painting are primarily of a documentary order; and the works in question should perhaps not be considered under the heading of painting at all, but rather as adjuncts and auxiliaries of the Victorian … Continue reading

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US AND THEM: THE MADCAP LAUGHS

Henry Fuseli’s painting “The Mandrake” , now lost, struck the aging Horace Walpole as “shockingly mad, madder than ever, quite mad!” But Fuseli would hardly have regarded that as an insult. Much of the time he was trading on madness … Continue reading

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BERLIOZ: VIBRATIONS OF THE UNEXPLORED DEPTHS

”As a conductor of his own compositions he was incomparable […] His music, frequently rugged in contrasts and daring leaps, is also insinuating and suave at times, and so too was his conducting; one moment he would be high in … Continue reading

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SCHOOLBOY IN VICARIOUS DISGRACE

”His brief stint at the Blacking Factory haunted him all of his life — he spoke of it only to his wife and to his closest friend, John Forster — but the dark secret became a source both of creative … Continue reading

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