1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hunt, Alfred William

HUNT, ALFRED WILLIAM (1830–1896), English painter, son of Andrew Hunt, a landscape painter, was born at Liverpool in 1830. He began to paint while at the Liverpool Collegiate School; but as the idea of adopting the artist’s profession was not favoured by his father, he went in 1848 to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His career there was distinguished; he won the Newdigate Prize in 1851, and became a Fellow of Corpus in 1858. He did not, however, abandon his artistic practice, for, encouraged by Ruskin, he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1854, and thenceforward regularly contributed landscapes in oil and water-colour to the London and provincial exhibitions. In 1861 he married, gave up his Fellowship, and was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours, receiving full membership three years later. His work is distinguished mainly by its exquisite quality and a poetic rendering of atmosphere. Hunt died on 3rd May 1896. Mrs A. W. Hunt (née Margaret Raine) wrote several works of fiction; and one of her daughters, Violet Hunt, is well known as a novelist.

See Frederick Wedmore, “Alfred Hunt,” Magazine of Art (1891); Exhibition of Drawings in Water Colour by Alfred William Hunt, Burlington Fine Arts Club (1897).