Wm. Holman Hunt

1864

Medium

Albumen silver print

Dimensions

25.4 × 17.8 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-649425

> Julia Margaret Cameron was described by many of her friends and contemporaries as a lionizer, always searching for important artists and writers to place before her camera. She had intimate access to many of the most influential people in Victorian society and relished the opportunity of photographing them. Cameron also enjoyed the challenge of the confrontation—securing a likeness and demonstrating her ability to draw out the emotional and psychological characteristics of her sitters. > > By the spring of 1864 Cameron was sufficiently intrepid to begin transporting her camera equipment from the Isle of Wight to London. It was at Little Holland House that she first met William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and one of the leading painters of the day. Hunt’s works, much admired by the Victorian public, were widely reproduced as engravings and published in art magazines. He was drawn to the exoticism of the Middle East and traveled there widely in the 1850s and 1860s. In June 1854 in Jerusalem he began *The Finding of the Savior in the Temple* (now at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK), which secured his reputation…