Drawings Room display
Until 17 September 2017
This focused display is the first exhibition to investigate William Henry Hunt’s depiction of rural figures in his work of the 1820s and 1830s. It takes its lead from a watercolour in The Courtauld Gallery’s permanent collection, The Head Gardener, which is shown alongside significant loans from institutions and private collections.
Hunt gives us an appealing vision of a rural society of dignified individuals. Typical country characters are depicted in several key works including The Broom Gatherer, The Vegetable Man, and The Miller in his Mill.Several of Hunt’s rural figures portray staff on landed estates, such as that of the Earl of Essex. He had a remarkable talent for finding appealing textures and colours in humble interiors, fruit, and dead game as well as in homespun clothing and leather boots. But it is, above all, the humanity of his sympathetic portrayals of these country people, beautifully rendered in watercolour, that makes them remarkable. For Ruskin, a later champion of Hunt’s work, these watercolours were ‘virtually faultless’.