William Holman Hunt

William Holman Hunt painted with intense detail, bright colour and dense symbolism. Every leaf, fabric and object in his pictures is sharply observed, and often carries a meaning. Of all the Pre-Raphaelites, he stayed truest to the movement’s ideals all his life.

Born in London, he studied at the Royal Academy Schools and in 1848 founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. In the 1850s he travelled to the Holy Land to paint biblical scenes in their real settings, and later built a house in Jerusalem. His best known paintings include The Light of the World, at Keble College, Oxford, with a later version in St Paul’s Cathedral, and The Scapegoat.

A Converted British Family Sheltering a Christian Missionary from the Persecution of the Druids and Claudio and Isabella are both early Brotherhood works, full of saturated colour and careful drawing.