drawing
- Museum number
- 1958,0712.353
- Description
-
Plucking the Fowl; girl sits on right holding plucking fowl over bowl, straw on floor around her, to left wicker baskets leaning against red-brick wall. 1832
Watercolour with scratching out, touched with bodycolour
- Production date
- 1832
- Dimensions
-
Height: 346 millimetres
-
Width: 362 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Stainton 1985
In the late 1820s Hunt largely gave up making topographical views and turned to still-life subjects and rustic genre (in which he was able to combine elements of portraiture, landscape and still-life), developing a distinctive technique of minutely applied touches of colour, quite the reverse of his early style in which translucent washes were subordinated to a firm outline. The present watercolour, exhibited in 1833, is a direct and unsentimental example from Hunt's middle period: he was later to adopt a rather archly sentimental or humorously anecdotal manner.
Hunt's watercolours were much admired by Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, who approved of his concern for careful observation of natural detail, his sense of colour and his technique. Ruskin's detailed account of prismatic colouring in his influential book 'The Elements of Drawing', 1857, was largely based on his careful analysis of Hunt's practice: ". . . it had its origin and authority in the care with which he followed the varieties of colour in the shadow, no less than in the lights ... if all accidents of local colour, and all differences of line between direct and reflected light are to be rendered with absolute purity . . . only interlaced touches of pure tints on the paper will attain the required effect". Hunt's mastery of textural effects and the play of light is admirably demonstrated in the present watercolour.
In his Preface to the exhibition of the works of Prout and Hunt held at the Fine Art Society in 1879-80 Ruskin noted the reasons for the appeal of Hunt's works: "[they] were made for [the] ... middle classes, exclusively; ... The great people always bought Canaletto, not Prout, and Van Huysum, not Hunt. There was indeed no quality in the bright little watercolours which could look other than pert in ghostly corridors, and petty in halls of state; but they gave an unquestionable tone of liberal mindedness to a suburban villa, and were the cheerfullest possible decorations for a moderate-sized breakfast parlour opening on a nicely-mown lawn".
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1959, British Museum
1960, British Museum
1985, BM, British Landscape Watercolours 1600-1860, no.152
- Acquisition date
- 1958
- Acquisition notes
- Nettlefold sale, Christie's 5 June 1913 (28), bt Agnew's £57 15s. (+ frame £2 14s.); Agnew's 1914 (74), bt Lloyd, £75 (stock 8045).
UNDER THE TERMS OF THE BEQUEST, NONE OF THE PRINTS OR DRAWINGS BEQUEATHED BY R. W. LLOYD MAY BE LENT OUTSIDE THE BRITISH MUSEUM (Registration Numbers 1958,0712.318 to 3149).
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1958,0712.353
