experimental physics. His principal work was the collection and editing of the Mineral Statistics of the United Kingdom, and this he continued to the date of his retirement (1883), when the mining record office was transferred to the Home Office. He was elected F.R.S. in 1854. In 1884 he published a large volume on British Mining, in which the subject was dealt with very fully from an historical as well as a practical point of view. He also edited the fifth and some later editions of Ure’s Dictionary of Arts, Mines and Manufactures. He died in London on the 17th of October 1887. A mineralogical museum at Redruth has been established in his memory.
HUNT, THOMAS STERRY (1826–1892), American geologist and chemist, was born at Norwich, Conn., on the 5th of September 1826. He lost his father when twelve years old, and had to earn his own livelihood. In the course of two years he found employment in a printing office, in an apothecary’s shop, in a book store and as a clerk. He became interested in natural science, and especially in chemical and medical studies, and in 1845 he was elected a member of the Association of American Geologists and Naturalists at Yale—a body which four years later became the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1848 he read a paper in Philadelphia On Acid Springs and Gypsum Deposits of the Onondaga Salt Group. At Yale he became assistant to Professor B. Silliman, Jun., and in 1846 was appointed chemist to the Geological Survey of Vermont. In 1847 he was appointed to similar duties on the Canadian Geological Survey at Montreal under Sir William Logan, and this post he held until 1872. In 1859 he was elected F.R.S., and he was one of the original members and president of the Royal Society of Canada. He was a frequent contributor to scientific journals, writing on the crystalline limestones, the origin of continents, the chemistry of the primeval earth, on serpentines, &c. He also wrote a notable “Essay on the History of the names Cambrian and Silurian” (Canadian Naturalist, 1872), in which the claims of Sedgwick, with respect to the grouping of the Cambrian strata, were forcibly advocated. He died in New York City on the 12th of February 1892.
His publications include Chemical and Geological Essays (1875, ed. 2, 1879); Mineral Physiology and Physiography (1886); A New Basis for Chemistry (1887, ed. 3, 1891); Systematic Mineralogy (1891). See an obituary notice by Persifor Frazer, Amer. Geologist (xi. Jan. 1893), with portrait.
HUNT, WILLIAM HENRY (1790–1864), English water-colour painter, was born near Long Acre, London, on the 28th of March 1790. He was apprenticed about 1805 to John Varley, the landscape-painter, with whom he remained five or six years, exhibiting three oil pictures at the Royal Academy in 1807. He was early connected with the Society of Painters in Water-colour, of which body, then in a transition state, he was elected associate in 1824, and full member in 1827. To its exhibitions he was until the year of his death one of the most prolific contributors. Many years of Hunt’s uneventful and industrious life were passed at Hastings. He died of apoplexy on the 10th of February 1864. Hunt was one of the creators of the English school of water-colour painting. His subjects, especially those of his later life, are extremely simple; but, by the delicacy, humour and fine power of their treatment, they rank second to works of the highest art only. Considered technically, his works exhibit all the resources of the water-colour painter’s craft, from the purest transparent tinting to the boldest use of body-colour, rough paper and scraping for texture. His sense of colour is perhaps as true as that of any English artist. “He was,” says Ruskin, “take him for all in all, the finest painter of still life that ever existed.” Several characteristic examples of Hunt’s work, as the “Boy and Goat,” “Brown Study” and “Plums, Primroses and Birds’ Nests” are in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
HUNT, WILLIAM HOLMAN (1827–1910), English artist, was born in London on the 2nd of April 1827. An ancestor on his father’s side bore arms against Charles I., and went over to Holland, where he fought in the Protestant cause. He returned with William III., but the family failed to recover their property. Holman Hunt’s father was the manager of a city warehouse, with tastes superior to his position in life. He loved books and pictures, and encouraged his son to pursue art as an amusement, though not as a profession. At the age of twelve and a half Holman Hunt was placed in a city office, but he employed his leisure in reading, drawing and painting, and at sixteen began an independent career as an artist. When he was between seventeen and eighteen he entered the Royal Academy schools, where he soon made acquaintance with his lifelong friend John Everett Millais, then a boy of fifteen. In 1846 Holman Hunt sent to the Royal Academy his first picture (“Hark!”), which was followed by “Dr Rochecliffe performing Divine Service in the Cottage of Joceline Joliffe at Woodstock,” in 1847, and “The Flight of Madeline and Porphyrio” (from Keats’s Eve of St Agnes) in 1848. In this year he and Millais, with the co-operation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others, initiated the famous Pre-Raphaelite movement in art. Typical examples of the new creed were furnished in the next year’s Academy by Millais’s “Isabella” and Holman Hunt’s “Rienzi vowing to obtain Justice for the Death of his Young Brother.” This last pathetic picture, which was sold to Mr Gibbons for £105, was followed in 1850 by “A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids” (bought by Mr Combe, of the Clarendon Press, Oxford, for £150), and in 1851 by “Valentine protecting Sylvia from Proteus.” This scene from The Two Gentlemen of Verona was very warmly praised by Ruskin (in letters to The Times), who declared that as studies both of drapery and of every minor detail there had been nothing in art so earnest and complete since the days of Albert Dürer. It gained a prize at Liverpool, and is reckoned as the finest of Holman Hunt’s earlier works. In 1852 he exhibited “A Hireling Shepherd.” “Claudio and Isabella,” from Measure for Measure, and a brilliant study of the Downs near Hastings, called in the catalogue “Our English Coasts, 1852” (since generally known as “Strayed Sheep”), were exhibited in 1853. For three of his works Holman Hunt was awarded prizes of £50 and £60 at Liverpool and Birmingham, but in 1851 he had become so discouraged by the difficulty of selling his pictures, that he had resolved to give up art and learn farming, with a view to emigration. In 1854 he achieved his first great success by the famous picture of “The Light of the World,” an allegorical representation of Christ knocking at the door of the human soul. This work produced perhaps the greatest effect of any religious painting of the century. “For the first time in England,” wrote William Bell Scott, “a picture became a subject of conversation and general interest from one end of the island to the other, and indeed continued so for many years.” “The Awakening Conscience,” exhibited at the same time, depicted a tragic moment in a life of sin, when a girl, stricken with memories of her innocent childhood, rises suddenly from the knees of her paramour. The inner meaning of both these pictures was explained by Ruskin in letters to The Times in May 1854. “The Light of the World” was purchased by Mr Combe, and was given by his wife to Keble College. In 1904 Holman Hunt completed a second “Light of the World,” slightly altered from the original, the execution of which was due to his dissatisfaction with the way in which the Keble picture was shown there; and he intended the second edition of it for as wide public exhibition as possible. It was acquired by Mr Charles Booth, who arranged for the exhibition of the new “Light of the World” in all the large cities of the colonies.
In January 1854 Holman Hunt left England for Syria and Palestine with the desire to revivify on canvas the facts of Scripture history, “surrounded by the very people and circumstances of the life in Judaea of old days.” The first fruit of this idea, which may be said to have dominated the artist’s life, was “The Scapegoat,” a solitary outcast animal standing alone on the salt-encrusted shores of the Dead Sea, with the mountains of Edom in the distance, seen under a gorgeous effect of purple evening light. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856, together with three Eastern landscapes. His next picture (1860), one of the most elaborate and most successful of his works, was “The Finding of our Saviour in the Temple.” Like all his
