Sheep and goats
AUBERON WAUGH
My Grandfather, His Wives and Loves Diana Holman Hunt (Hamish Hamilton 45s) My Grandmothers and 1 Diana Holman Hunt (Hamish Hamilton 42s)
Readers of Miss Holman Hunt's new book should not be put off by the vulgarity of its title. It is a worthy successor to the memorable study of her paternal grandmother, which is re-issued.with it at the somewhat exhorbitant price, for a second edition, of forty-two shillings, and answers many of the questions which the first volume left unanswered. With luck, we shall one day see a third volume, covering the artist's mar- ried life with the second of the two Misses Waugh.
Experts and close students of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood will no doubt find
much to intrigue them in the second book, but I rather fancy that it will cause keenest enjoyment to people who are neither of these things. Although there is plentiful evidence of the most painstaking research, if one judges only by Miss Holman Hunt's account of her visit to Somerset at the beginning of her quest, one must decide that she has not inherited that passion for accurate observa- tion which many have criticised as being almost taken to the point of pedantry in the work of her distinguished grandfather.
The second half of the last century was surely the most exciting time for any Englishman to live who was interested in arts or ideas—or technology, for that matter. Nothing which has happened before or since in the small world of English painting can hake been so keenly felt as the arrival of the Pre-Raphaelites on a scene already enlivened by the great Victorian narrative pain- ters—Egg, Frith, Smith, O'Neill. Yet curiously enough we have no enormous bibliography of the period for those unwill ing to plod through the original sources, and must rely on such glimpses as this, and the half-remembered gossip of those who were once better informed.
Miss Holman-Hunt disabuses this reviewer of a favourite story--that Lizzie Siddal died of pneumonia contracted while
she was posing for Ophelia, because Millais was too mean to heat the water tank in
which she floated. But there are plenty of new delightful stories to take its place. She supplements the story of Hunt boiling a horse in his Kensington garden with the
account of what happened to the goat in the Scapegoat, and how Hunt was obliged
to stun it to keep it still. There is also an
account of what Rossetti had to do to the calf in Found. One dreads to think how Madox Brown managed with all those sheep in Pretty Baa Lambs. My poor cousin, Fan- ny Waugh, who was Hunt's first wife, was made to stand for weeks on end in her eighth month of pregnancy while he painted her for Isabella and the Pot of Basil, and her death in childbirth must at least in part have been caused by his treatment of her.
Later, when Hunt approached my great- great-great uncle. George Waugh, and asked for another of his daughters—Edith, Miss Holman Hunt's grandmother—the poor old gentleman died almost immediately. The Waughs never spoke to the Hunts again. un- til the author of these volumes appeared on the scene, and one can't help feeling they had a point. Still, there is a certain pietas lacking in Miss Holman-Hunt's raking over what would nowadays be called the pre-marital and extra-marital affairs of her grandfather of which I feel sure my Uncle George would not have approved. Annie Miller was a com- mon, untrustworthy woman who profited nothing from Hunt's efforts to educate her and almost certainly blackmailed him after his marriage. A curious memorial to her re- mains in the picture 11 Dolce Far Nietue. which has the body and hair of Annie but the face of poor cousin Fanny. It is not one of Hunt's most successful pictures. His other women were of no consequence, apart from the two sisters he married.
The book does little to characterise Hunt, but it gives countless excellent anecdotes of his life and times. I particularly like the story of how Lizzie Siddal, after her marri- age to Rossetti, would put Swinburne, when drunk, into a cab and send him to other friends with a label round his neck: 'Al- gernon Swinburne Esq to . . . from Mrs Rossetti.' But the best part deals with Hunt's extraordinary toughness, painting his biblical pictures in the appalling regions of the Middle East which he chose in obedience to his compulsive appetite for accuracy.
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