William Holman Hunt

Holman Hunt exhibited an early aptitude for art, which his father, a warehouse manager, initially opposed but later tolerated. Between 1839 and 1843 he practiced drawing and studied with the portrait painter Henry Rogers while sustaining himself as an office clerk. Hunt met John Everett Millais (1829-1896) the same year that he entered the Royal Academy Schools, 1844. A decisive conversion in his attitude toward art came with the reading of John Ruskin's Modern Painters in 1847, immediately after which he embarked on a new style of conscientious naturalism in The Flight of Madeline and...