The Sun.
London, England, 1868-04-27 00:00:00

HOLMAN HUNT'S NEW PICTURE.

Another great work of art, in many respects the
greatest of any he has yet produced, Hobnail Hunt
has now added to the series of his masterpieces.
The picture is at present on viewin the Messrs. Game
bart and Company's Gallery, at No. 1, King-street,
St. James's. It is of considerable dimensions and
of extraordinary elaboration. For what must be
termed chromatic effect, it may take rank with
" The Light of the World," for luminous beauty
with the "After Glow," for profound impressive-
ness with the " Finding in the Temple." As the
latest, and, in very many particulars, the most re-
markable evidence of the daring originality of the
artist's genius, it shows him to us as he is now—
namely, at his best and at his greatest. Begun at
Florence and finished in England, this extraordi-
nary painting has occupied him, as we arc given
to understand, about two years in iti pro-
duction. For his subject he has agsiin
had recourse to the imaginings of the most sensuous,
as he is also one of the very greatest, poets of the
century—Keats. But since the period (1818) when,
in his twenty-first yen., he gave us his bodying
forth of Keats's " St. Agnes," the ripening of Hol-
man Hunt's powers has, in truth, been something
marvellous—comparing that youthful picture of his
with the present one, this wonderful product of the
artist's capacities, which are just now in their full
maturity, this bodying forth thus, in his forty-first
year, of Keats's " Isabella." To the author of the
" Decameron," of course, rather than to the author
of " Endyinion" and " Hyperion," the love-bra
heroine of that profoundly pathetic story of the
Pot of Basil owes her existence originally.
-Yet by means of the exquisite sheen of
poetry through which English readers have
long since learnt to contemplate the terrors
and anguish of her affecting history, now that that
history has been sublimated by the bewitching
verse of Keats, Keats has . made her and her
sorrows far more his own than they ever were
Boccaccio's. To Keats, therefore, rather than to
Boccaccio, Holman Hunt has gone for inspiration.
To Keats and to Natuie—to Poet and to Reality
—guided in his quest throughout by the unerring
instinct of his own rare genius as an artist. As
when in the " After Glow," the moment selected
by the Painter was (as indeed the very title of the
work itself indicated) immediately after sunset
so hero in this still more remarkable picture of the
"Pot of Basil," the moment chosen is immediately
glimmeringbeforesunrise. In the former the glory was fading or
down in the West, whereas in the latter
it is faintly dawning or glimmering up from the Ease
—there in an Egyptian, here in a Florentine atmo-
sphere. The " After Glow," it will be remembered,
was an out-of-doors picture—the " Pot of Basil"
reveals to us, on the contrary, the interior of a
luxurious apartment, or rather suite of apartments.
Narrowed though the glimpse afforded us down
that suite of apartments is, by reason of the re-
stricted width of the canvass, the distance suggested
by the perspective is something really astonishing.
We see at a glance that the grief-stricken maiden
has left her bed at the earliest glint of
morning and wandered into the adjoining
room, which she has made the sanctuary of
her despairing love, the spot consecrated by her to
the preservation of her ghastly treasure. Lorenzo's
head—secretly dug up by her from the forest dell to
which her lover had been lured, and in which he had
been murdered by her two brothers: the mouldering
relic (unknown to them) being afterwards brought
home by Isabella, and buried away in a beautiful
vase (or pot, as the old legend calls it) under the
Toots of a Basil, watered by her tears ! In that
one sentence lies the whole pathos of the story.
Upon the form, but more especially upon the
features of Isabella herself, the whole re-
sources of the painter of this wonderful picture
have been lavished. Clad as the beautiful maiden
is, merely in her night dress, the symmetry, and
even, in a partial manner, the warm flesh tints of
her lovely limbs, of her whole lithesome shape
in its ductile and flowing outlines, are
discernible through the semi-transparent texture of
the delicate white drapery. Her feet are uncovered.
Her left arm is clasped right round the capacious
orb of the basil pot. Her right hand is pressed
upon it tenderly, yearningly—AS she stands, there,
beside the depssitory of her cherishe I but dreadful
secret, gazing upon it askance, gazing into it rather,
as though, in spiritu d. vision, her sight could pens-
trate to the very heart aa I innermost core of that
fair-seeming and blooming trophy of her undying
tenderness. She gazes, as (before the exhumation
and decapitation)—

"She gazed into the fresh thrown mould, as though
Ono glance did fully all its enrets tell ;
Clearly she saw as other eyes would know
Pale limbs at bottom of a crystal well."
Her eyeballs tearless, now, as if her heart
and brain had already rained away all the tears at
her command—shine luminously with love and
anguish, as only (it might have been thought
until now) eyes of lovers and mourners actually
living and in the flesh could shine. They are the
glory, the " bright particular stars," the wonder of
the whole picture. Looking at them, it is almost
incredible to think that they are mere painted
semblances of woe. A soul shines through them,
as it does, in truth, through all the sentient lines of
the grief-worn, mobile we had almost said, breath-
ing countenance. Examining the picture for the
first time the attention is absorbed, is swallowed
up, is wholly mastered, as it should be, by a
contemplation of the central figure, the one human
form upon the canvass, the form and features of the
fair Florentine maiden of Keats and of Boccaccio.
Afterwards,when the glamour exercised by the pain-
ter's genius over our imagination has had its swing,
has been fully recognized, and when we turn to a
consideration of the various accessories of the nu-
merous details introduced into this extraordinary
picture, we perceive that there, too, in those
seemingly trivial details and minor accessories of
it as a work of art, there is not one amongst them
but has its peculiar and affecting significance, there
is not one amongst them but what is a wondrous
achievement in its way, but what is a very marvel
of executive skill in the painter's art. With a full
assurance that we exaggerate nothing when so
speaking, we here quite confidently assert, for ex-
ample, that never yet' has there been pourtrayed
upon canvass, in Italy or England—anywhere for
that matter— such a basil plant, such a jar or pot of
majolica, such a cabinet of inlaid m ood, or such a
water-pot of opal glass as stands in front of that
piece of furniture. The realistic effect of each and
all of them fills us with astonishment. Of the
green flowering basil plant we could pluck a
branch—and smell to it While the ma-

jolica jar or pot, out of which It is growing, bears
all the appearance of an actual specimen, of the
ceramic art in its vitrious gloss and all its gor-
geous colouring. Exception may be taken to the
grimly death's heads, symbolically introduced here
and there into the design of it, as rendering un-
likely its selection by Isabella for her strange pur-
pose—unlikely, because so directly suggestive to
her brother of the " wormy circumstance" of " the
thing"
"vile with green and livid spot," of
the poor head with its " wild hair" calmed
with a golden comb, hid away within there
under the roots of the sweet-smelling 'basil. The
very piece of furniture, even, which iu the .picture
forms the pedestal or pediment for the pot of
basil, as it is here depictel by the brush of Hol-
man Hunt, is such in its absolute verisimilitude, in
its solidity, in the sheen of its polished sides,
that it might be wheeled aside, one might think, as
readily to one part of the picture as to another.
'rite embroidered coverlet, too, is just as marvel-
lous in its verisimilitude—bearing evidence of the
haunting memory of Lorenz) in the heart of Isa-
bella, of whom, in the happier days of her love,
the English poet sings—
Hot- Into strings gave the echo of his name ;
She spoilt her half-done broidery with the same.
Regard should be had, moreover —by every visitor
to the Messrs. Gambart's gallery, or rather to the
studio set apart there especially for the display of
Holman Hunt's latest and greatest work of art—
especial regard should be had, we conceive, to one
other of those marvellous subordinate portions of
the picture, in the delineation of which the artist
has given the last and crowning evidence of his
peerless capabilities as a realist in art. So tritua.