Holman Hunt’s frames

A shorter version of this article was first published in The Pre-Raphaelite Society Review, 30th anniversary edition, vol. XXVI, no 3, autumn 2018

When we consider the revolutionary impact which the very young members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood must have had on contemporary academic art (the landscapes painted en plein air in brilliant greens[1], the lack of idealization of the human figure, the direct engagement with social problems, literary subjects depicted realistically, rather than romantically), there’s an additional aspect of their work which has often been neglected – the idea of the work of art as a whole object completed by its frame.

The Pre-Raphaelites were probably the most continuously productive group of artists since the 17th century who insisted on frames specifically designed for their paintings: frames which could stand out from a mass hang in exhibitions, enhance the meaning of the work with inscriptions and symbolic motifs, provide an aesthetic interval between painting and wall, or reflect the period and place of the painted subject. And amongst the Pre-Raphaelites, the most imaginative and continuously inventive designer of frames from c.1851 to 1904 was William Holman Hunt.

Early designs

Their earliest artist-designed frames were produced around three years after the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had formed in 1848: Millais’s design for a painting by Collins, his fellow PRB, Convent thoughts, and Holman Hunt’s frame for his own work, The hireling shepherd.

William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Rienzi vowing to obtain justice for the death of his young brother…, 1849, o/c, 83 x 117 cm., & detail, on loan to the National Gallery from The Ramsbury Manor Foundation, © Capricorn Foundation

Millais’s design for Convent thoughts is outrageously modernizing compared with the frame used for his Isabella, a couple of years earlier. This is very similar to the frame of Hunt’s contemporary painting Rienzi, above: a Victorian stock frame, bought off the peg, with a round top edge and deep scotia or hollow decorated with shallow impressed patterns cast in composition (‘compo’). It is basically a commercial revival of an 18th century French Baroque style, with a machine-cut wooden moulding where none of the ornament – even the raised corners – needed to be hand-carved; the sort of conventional mid-19th century frame an artist would use when submitting work to the Royal Academy or to other public exhibitions.

J.E. Millais (1829-96), frame for Charles Allston Collins (1828-73), Convent thoughts, 1850-51, o/c, 84 x 59 cm., & detail, Ashmolean Museum

In contrast, the frame of Convent thoughts is a flat wooden plane with minimalist mouldings, decorated with two flamboyantly naturalistic plaster lilies, and the black-letter inscription ‘Sicut lilium’ (‘as the lily…’ [2]). It is at once highly symbolic and extremely decorative. Millais wrote of it to the purchaser, Thomas Combe,

‘I have designed a frame for Charles’ painting of “Lilies”, which, I expect, will be acknowledged to be the best frame in England’ [3].

It would not look out of place on a Belgian Symbolist painting of 50 years later.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The hireling shepherd, 1850-51, o/c, 76.4 x 109.5 cm., & detail, Ashmolean Museum

Hunt’s frame for The hireling shepherd appears less strikingly avant-garde at first glance, but it is completely different from the normal academic type of frame. It has a simple linear structure with a convex or cushion frieze, and is at once decorative, symbolic and satirical.

François Boucher (1703-70), Le pont, 1751, o/c, 66 x 84.5 cm., Musée du Louvre

The arrangement of naturalistic ears of wheat and stooks parodies and mocks the curving lines and the corner-centre emphases of Louis XIV-XV frames: the kind of pattern found on pastoral paintings of the late 17th and the 18th century, peopled by the beautifully dressed peasants and ‘Dresden china bergers’ [4] which Hunt was mocking with his realistic farmhands. The wheat also has added significance in relation to the painting; it underlines the destructive lure of the cornfield, from which the ‘Good Shepherd’ should protect his flock, and which the ‘Hireling’ has ignored whilst he flirts with a buxom peasant girl.

All the ornament is executed in compo, which the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood rejected to a large extent after coming into the ambit of the critic John Ruskin. Ruskin believed that no material should pretend to be something it wasn’t – so composition which pretended to be wood was undesirable, and so was gilding on a layer of smooth gesso, since this aspired to look like solid gold or ormolu. Economics and the greater ease of producing cast ornament partly undermined this resolution as time went on – some of Hunt’s frames depended on repeated or re-used motifs which could be turned out ad infinitum from a single carved mould – but it is also true that the Brotherhood gave a great boost to the art of carved wooden frames in the second half of the 19th century, and that Hunt produced designs which were beautifully carved by framemakers such as Joseph Green and Foord & Dickinson. He also, unlike Ford Madox Brown and D.G. Rossetti, favoured gilding on gesso, rather than directly onto (usually oak) wood; only one of his frames leaves out the gesso layer [5].

George Scharf (1820-95), Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1828, ink, watercolour, 18.9 x 26 cm., London Museum

It is hard for us now to see the cleverness and radical nature of Hunt’s design for the frame of The hireling shepherd, since we are no longer attuned to a contemporary and changing fashion in frames – nor to an establishment style of historical revivals, which had become increasingly fossilized during the first half of the 19th century, and which the growing mechanization of industrial processes had deprived of the carvers’ and gilders’ creative input. Hunt and Millais were rebelling against these banal and conventional forms, just as they were rebelling against idealized figures and ‘brown’ landscapes in their paintings.

Innovative frame designs and symbols

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The awakening conscience, 1853, o/c, 76.2 x 55.9 cm., and detail, Tate Britain

Hunt’s frame for The awakening conscience from a couple of years later similarly combines a novel decorative design with a symbolism which comments on the painting. It employs the simplified structure of an early Renaissance cassetta or Northern cabinetmaker’s frame – a flat frieze between small mouldings – together with an arched inlay. This frame is carved in shallow relief on three sides of the frieze with, according to Hunt’s friend and colleague, F.G. Stephens,

‘…ringing bells, and marigolds, the emblems of warning and sorrow’ [6],

and a star in the top centre symbolizing the redeeming light which floods the painting from the reflected window.  The bottom rail is inscribed with a biblical text (‘As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.’ [7]), which – together with the three-sided decorative structure – looks back to a Northern Gothic altarpiece frame. Without this frame, the painting would lose many of the indications which would have prepared the contemporary spectator for a scene with a moral undertow; as it is usually illustrated without its frame in books from the late 19th century onwards, a modern student of Holman Hunt is deprived of the artist’s own commentary on his work.

Designs of this innovatory and imaginative quality did not leap fully formed from Hunt’s and Millais’s minds.

Friedrich Overbeck (1789-1869), The pardon of Assisi, 1829, fresco above the entrance to the Porziuncola, Santa Maria degli Angeli, Assisi

As with early Pre-Raphaelite paintings there was considerable influence on their frames from the German Nazarenes (for example, Overbeck’s symbolically bordered fresco on the façade of the Porziuncola, above, or Victor Orsel’s frame on his Le Bien et le Mal, 1829-32 ). Ford Madox Brown, friend, mentor and emulator of the PRB, who had trained in Belgium and befriended artists in the Nazarene group whilst in Rome, had a natural sympathy for Northern and Gothic art, and for its 19th century revival.

Ford Madox Brown (1821-93), The first translation of the Bible into English: Wycliffe, 1847-48, 1859-61, unframed canvas, 119.5 x 153.5 cm., Bradford Art Galleries

Brown was also the first amongst the PRB and their connections to design his own frames: for instance, a Gothic structure (now unfortunately lost) for Wycliffe Reading his Translation of the Bible…, which originally also had its own integral painted inner frame (above), which was later covered over by the artist with an updated and plainer moveable wooden frame and inlay .

Ford Madox Brown (1821-93), The seeds & fruits of English poetry, 1845-53, o/c, 36 x 46 cm., Ashmolean Museum

His earlier work, The seeds and fruits of English poetry (1845), had been composed like a secular triptych, with an integral painted frame of stone arches decorated with pierced tracery.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti would have seen both these paintings in Brown’s studio when, in 1848, he briefly became a pupil there; both pieces with their painted Gothic frames, so different from the commercial patterns he was used to. Ford Madox Brown must have described to both younger men the Northern portraits and altarpieces with which he had grown up in Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, since in 1849-50, rather than a take an economic version of the Grand Tour to Italy, Rossetti and Holman Hunt visited Paris and Belgium together, where they found early Flemish paintings framed in a style which was also utterly unlike the Italian and French revival models popular in 19th century Britain.

Jan van Eyck (pre-1395-d. pre-1441), Margareta van Eyck, 1439, o/panel, 32.6 x 25.8 cm., with frame: 41.5 x 35 cm., & detail, Groeningemuseum, Bruges

Jan van Eyck’s portrait of his wife, Margareta, for example (acquired by the museum in 1808), was on display when they passed through Bruges.  Frames like this one, and like others by Van Eyck and his peers, share elements which would reappear in designs by Brown, Hunt and Rossetti –  simple, often shallow, profiles; flat top edges or central friezes, sometimes bordered by small mouldings; deep hollows or slanting rainsills at the sight edge; inscriptions which expand upon the image in the painting; finishes which were not just gilded but might be stained or painted; and horizontal or vertical ‘butt’ joints instead of mitred joints [8].

After Hunt and Rossetti returned to London, there is a lapse of time during which they, Brown and Millais must have continually discussed the question of framing their work in a way which would differentiate it from ‘establishment art’, without arousing critical contempt. The reception of the first Gothic frames which Rossetti designed for his early works, Ecce Ancilla and The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, were savage –

‘golden glories, fanciful scribblings on the frames, and other infantine absurdities’ [9]

He reframed them, just as Brown’s Wycliffe… was reframed for the art collector, Thomas Plint. In spite of these attacks, however, the Brotherhood regrouped, and from 1854 there is a great burst of artist-designed frames from them which influenced modern framing all over Europe, even into the 20th century. But whilst Ford Madox Brown and Rossetti concentrated (with occasional divergences) mainly on geometric patterns, repeated for multiple works, Hunt produced idiosyncratic patterns individually designed for almost every one, or for small groups, of his paintings.

He had a seemingly limitless inventive capacity for clothing his work in an astonishingly varied array of frames – carved in wood, carved in shallow relief in the gesso, inlaid with bone, covered in applied composition ornament to his own design, carved in shallow relief and painted naturalistically, or stencilled – and continued to produce innovatory settings over a period of more than fifty years without any slackening of his imaginative flair.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The scapegoat, 1854-56, o/c, 86.5 x 139.8 cm., Lady Lever Gallery, Port Sunlight

An early and comparatively well-known example frames The scapegoat. This was conserved a few years ago, cleansing it of its previously rather dull and dank patina and restoring the halo of bright gold which must have created a stunningly exotic effect when the painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856 [10]. Salon frames in Britain were very much after the type of the commercial stock frame on the early Rienzi; in contrast Hunt’s design for The scapegoat is a solid, slightly convex bar of gold, into which symbolic motifs have been carved in shallow relief.

Holman Hunt, The scapegoat, details of top and bottom centre panels

These motifs are designed to support the Old Testament subject of the painting, but intriguingly they also work to expand upon the image itself by alluding to events in the New Testament (none of which appear in the painting). So the shaped panel at the top, decorated with seven stars, uses a Biblical quotation to link the scapegoat to Christ:

‘Surely he hath borne our Griefs, and carried our Sorrows
yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of GOD, and afflicted’

This is balanced by a further quotation at the bottom, where another shaped panel carries the title on either side of a seven-branched candelabrum or menorah:

‘And the Goat shall bear upon him all their
Iniquities unto a Land not inhabited.’

The menorah is a symbol of redemption, and the seven stars stand for the risen Christ, who had taken on Himself the burden of man’s sins.

Hunt, The scapegoat, details of lateral centre panels

On the right-hand vertical rail, a cruciform sprig of stylized heartsease decorates the central panel; this is a variety of wild pansy, or love-lies-bleeding, and links the pain of living with the love of Christ. On the left-hand side a dove with an olive branch is carved into a trefoil, uniting the symbol of peace with that of the Trinity. Without its frame the painting is a depiction of unrelieved suffering and despair, whilst united with it – as a complete artwork – it conveys spiritual hope along with the redemptive power of Christ.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 1854-56, o/c, 141 x 85.7 cm., Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

The frame of The finding of the Saviour… is even more emblematically complex. Holman Hunt described it as

‘designed by myself with ivory flat, in what I meant to be semi-barbaric splendour’[11]

When it toured the country from Truro to Carlisle between 1863 and 1868, it must have broken like a magnificent alien artefact into the provincial galleries of Victorian Britain. F.G. Stephens described it like this:

F.G. Stephens, W. Holman Hunt and his works, 1860, note 25, p.78-79

Holman Hunt, The finding of the Saviour in the Temple, details of frame

He also quotes one of the early critical responses to a Pre-Raphaelite frame from the Manchester Guardian:

‘There are symbols everywhere… Nay, the symbols have overflowed the picture, and expanded themselves all over the frame.’

What these symbols are doing – just as on the frame of The scapegoat – is enlarging upon the painted image. In the picture we are shown an incident in the life of the young Christ, when he wanders away from his parents and is discovered by them arguing with the doctors in the temple; but then what the frame indicates to us, beyond the simple narrative, is that the New Law of Christ (the sun) will outshine the Judaic Law of the Old Testament (the eclipsed moon). Hunt has also used the silhouette of the frame, with its shallow gabled effect, and the rails crossed at the bottom corners, to suggest the outline of a temple, in an imaginative variation on a Gothic or Renaissance altarpiece.

Owen Jones and The grammar of ornament

Beyond his drive to present biblical subjects in a realistic and non-idealized way, with Jewish models, Palestinian landscapes, and props which were as convincing as possible, Hunt was concerned to extend this search for authenticity to the frame.

Owen Jones (1809-74), The grammar of ornament, 1856, ‘Arabian No 5’

He could travel to the Near East for everything he needed for his paintings, but collecting enough sketches of appropriate ornaments would have been extremely time-consuming, and – whilst he did fill notebooks with these sorts of decorative detail – he was helped immensely by the publication in 1856 of that remarkable book, Owen Jones’s The grammar of ornament. Here Jones had collected examples of surface patterning from every period, country and culture he had been able to discover, providing an encyclopaedia of motifs which was a boon to the 19th century framemaker.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Cairo: sunset on the Gebel Mokattum, 1854 & 1860-61, watercolour, 16.5 x 35.6 cm., frame: 44.2 x 63.4 x 3.1 cm., & detail, Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester

For instance, the series of watercolours which Hunt executed in Egypt and Palestine from 1854, and which were mostly framed in 1861, adapted patterns which can be found on Jones’s pages on Arabian and Byzantine ornament. The outer wooden frame of Cairo: sunset on the Gebel Mokattum is decorated in black on gold with the interlaced scrolling rectilinear border from the second row down of ‘Arabian No 5’, and has a raised medallion on the gilded inlay based on the coloured rosette at the top of the page before it, ‘Arabian No 4‘.

Owen Jones (1809-74), The grammar of ornament, 1856, ‘Byzantine No 1′

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The Dead Sea from Siloam, 1854-55, watercolour, 24.8 x 34.8 cm., Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

The Dead Sea from Siloam has a different black scrolling ornament on the flat top edge, which is a simplification of the double foliate S-scrolls on ‘Byzantine No 1’ (the first square of the second row down), whilst the raised interlocking circles and diapers on the gilt inlay come from the bottom row of the same page (the third square along). Jerusalem during Ramadan and Nazareth (both 1854 and in the collection of the Whitworth Art Gallery) have similar frames to this one.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The lantern maker’s courtship, 1854-61, 54.8 x 34.7 cm., Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery; (left) detail of roundel on frame with medallion from Owen Jones, ‘Arabian No 5‘; (right) detail of frieze on frame with source ornament from Jones, ‘Arabian No 2‘

There are other motifs on his frames which must also have been taken directly from The grammar of ornament. The lanternmaker’s courtship (1854-61, Birmingham MAG) makes a spectacularly good use of cast compo (composition ornament), which covers the whole width of the flat rail in a shallow relief gilded moulding; the circular motifs in the top corners and bottom centre reproduce the medallion in ‘Arabian No 5’, whilst the frieze ornament comes from the central panel of ‘Arabian No 2’. Copying these motifs, even moulded in compo rather than carved in wood, required expense, dedication, and a very good framemaker, since the moulds themselves were, at that time, made of boxwood – a very hard, close-grained wood, into which every ornament had to be carved by hand, in reverse. Once done, the mould could be used again and again, which is why the ‘Arabian No 5’ medallion appears so often on Hunt’s frames; it was an investment which he could turn to whenever he wanted a decoration for the frame of an Arabic, Palestinian or other Near Eastern subject.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The afterglow in Egypt, 1861, o/c, 82 x 37 cm., Ashmolean Museum

It appears, for example, on the otherwise very plain flat frame of The afterglow in Egypt (the small version of the subject, in the Ashmolean Museum). Here, the simplicity of the main frieze between vestigial mouldings and the lower, smaller frieze provides the perfect foil for the rich colouring and decorative detail of the painting, whilst the four centred medallions create a cruciform emphasis for the figure.

This particular frame, with its flat rails broken only by Hunt’s Arabian roundels, may well have influenced Rossetti in the composition of his own medallion frames. These began with the symbol-laden roundels on the frame of Beata Beatrix in 1864 , and developed into the circular motifs like cut fruit which he used from c.1868 until his death in 1882.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The afterglow in Egypt, 1854, o/c, 185.4 x 86.3 cm., Southampton City Art Gallery

Holman Hunt, The afterglow in Egypt, detail of frame, and details from Owen Jones, ‘Arabian No 2‘

Further ornaments from Owen Jones’s book decorate the very different frame of the large Afterglow, for which there is also a drawing by Hunt; the striking scrolling and undulating stylized leaves (which Jones calls ‘feathering’) have been adapted from The grammar of ornament, ‘Arabian No 2’ and ‘No 3’. Perhaps Hunt saw them as stylized ears of barley, echoing those in the painting, as well as a symbol of the Near East.

Owen Jones, ‘Arabian No 4‘ (reversed to show the top more clearly), and Holman Hunt, detail of a design for the frame of The afterglow in Egypt, c.1863, 50.8 x 34.9 cm., private collection

The interlaced ornament which defines the inner and outer contours of the frieze with its arched top, is also taken from Jones – more specifically from his ‘Arabian No 4’, as noted on Hunt’s drawing for the frame. The arched structure, based on a page of the Qur’an, has been adapted to the double border of the wooden frame, and the top has been stretched laterally and softened into a cusped form of round arch, creating a doorway like some of the carved stone entrances he sketched on his travels through the Holy Land.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The plain of Esdraelon from the heights above Nazareth, 1876, o/c, 41 x 75 cm., Ashmolean Museum

In 1876 Hunt returned to Jones for The plain of Esdraelon, painted more than twenty years after the large Afterglow. The borders of the large Afterglow appear again in this later cassetta; they are painted  with the same design – what Hunt calls a ‘chain pattern’. He wrote to F.G. Stephens from Jerusalem, on 1st March 1877, requesting his help:

‘I send you two designs for frames which ought to be put in hand at once.  The smaller one which is on blue paper is for a watercolour.  It is half the dimensions of the frame… It is to be of composition not of wood and to be of matt gold – so Green of Charles St. may be the best gilder and maker unless you find a better.  The other is for an oil picture and is to be either wood or composition.  Hughes’ carver Mr Goodison may be able to carve it in which case let it be wood.  If not please go to Greens and ask them whether they can do it in wood; one of the men there carves in after hours.  If he can do it well, if not let it be done in composition. Ask the price first for carving alone and for this and gilding without saying it is for me. The small frame to have reddish coloured gold. I will send the sketch for the chain pattern by next post…’

Holman Hunt, medallion from The plain of Esdraelon, top; motifs from Owen Jones, ‘Arabian: No 3‘: the source for the medallion, centre, and the ‘chain pattern’, bottom

As well as its appearance in the form with cusped arches used for the large Afterglow, the ’chain’ motif is illustrated more clearly at the right-hand side of ‘Arabian No 3′ in the second row down, whilst the medallions used for The plain of Esdraelon freely adapt the central motif on its left, in the same row[12]. A drawing for the latter also exists, where the suggestions in the book are elaborated and clarified. Hunt’s meticulous instructions, backing up his sketches, and his use of Jones’s Grammar of ornament, emphasize the care he expended on achieving an almost archaeological accuracy and appropriateness in his frames.

Hunt’s own sketches as sources for frames

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The shadow of death, 1870-73, o/c, 214.2 x 168.2 cm., Manchester City Art Gallery

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The shadow of death, 1870-73, o/c, 94 x 73.6 cm., Leeds Art Gallery

Holman Hunt, The shadow of death, detail (large version, Manchester), with drawing of stone ornament, Jerusalem, c.1871, pencil, 12.7 x 17.8 cm., Ashmolean Museum

Hunt drew wherever he went: motifs from architectural ornament, interiors in Renaissance paintings, and antique frames, which were, of course, very important sources for his designs. A drawing of carved stone ornament which he had seen in Jerusalem provided the design on the frieze of the frames for both versions of The shadow of death, another weighty setting apparently forged out of gold bars. The combination of these authentic, specifically localized ornaments with Christian and Biblical emblems gives Hunt’s frame designs such a peculiarly intimate bond with the work they contain that to publish the painting without the setting is to diminish it significantly, and to deprive it of its superstructure of reference and local connection.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Isabella and the pot of basil, 1866-68, o/c, 187 x 116.5 cm., Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), drawing of picture frame, c.1869, 17 x 12.7 cm., Ashmolean Museum

Holman Hunt, Isabella and the pot of basil, detail of frame

When not applying source patterns from his own notes and the pages of Owen Jones, or confecting radical designs with minimal connection to any historical source, Hunt went in search of previously unmined references.  The massive frame for Isabella and the pot of basil with its heavy convex top edge – a half-round moulding decorated with clasps between flutes filled with imbricated coin ornaments – looks back to Italian and Spanish Mannerist frames from the 17th century, and may relate to a drawing by Hunt in the Ashmolean which shows a frame from a viewpoint beneath the bottom left corner. He recorded the profile of this frame, which looks like a serious intent to copy or adapt it.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Portrait of Miss Isabella Waugh, c.1866, Lyle & Turnbull, 1 November 2011, Lot 64

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), ornamental frieze on doorway of the mosque, the Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, 1876, chalk, 50.8 x 35.6 cm., Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

Another example of Hunt’s versatility in designing is the gilded frame for an unfinished study (probably of his sister-in-law, Isabella Waugh); it was executed at least a decade after the painting, and is based on an 1876 drawing of architectural ornament he had made in Jerusalem. The double band of undulating half-leaves on the frieze is punctuated by roundels engraved to simulate the phases of the moon (thus turning the portrait of a young Victorian woman wearing a classical diadem into an image of the goddess Artemis). Divorced from its Palestinian setting, this motif appears the essence of art nouveau, and Hunt re-used the braid of undulating half-leaves again for the garland on the top edge of the small copper May Morning… frame (see below).

Framing portraits: family and friends

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Self-portrait, 1867, o/c, 103.5 x 73 cm., Gallerie degli Uffizi

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Mrs Mary Waugh, 1868, o/canvas, 86.2 x 66.1 cm., Cleveland Museum of Art

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Edith Waugh (The birthday), 1868, o/c, 102.9 x 72.7 cm., Legion of Honor, FAMSF

Apart from the portrait of Isabella Waugh as Artemis, Hunt frequently drew his family and family-in-law, either as models for various works, or as themselves. Most importantly, there is the suite of five frames made for his mother-in-law (twice over), Mrs Mary Waugh, his first and second wives, Fanny (below) and Edith (above), his self-portrait in the Uffizi, and the copy by Edward Hughes in the Athaeneum, London.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910) and Edward Hughes (1851-1914), copy of Hunt’s Self-portrait, Athenaeum Club, London

These are designed in a geometric and uncomplicatedly decorative pattern, echoing the flat architrave frame pioneered so successfully by Millais for Collins’s Convent thoughts. They are constructed using right-angled butt-joints which swing round the four corners in a swastika pattern, highlighted by a zig-zag engraved over them as though they had been riveted or stitched together. A line of inlaid bone paterae crosses the corners diagonally; there are roundels in the corners, and the inner and outer contours have rounded and triangular indentations. The bone inlays take the form of quatrefoils on the portrait of Fanny, and the two Hunt portraits; those on Mrs Waugh are wedge-shaped, and on Edith are square. Otherwise the frames are identical, save that the centre panels of notched idents on the back edge of each is taken round the whole contour of Fanny’s frame.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Fanny Hunt, 1866-68, o/c, 104 x 73 cm., & detail, Toledo Museum of Art

This portrait, a memorial to the beloved first wife who had died during its execution, stands out slightly from the others because of its more decorative back edge and lack of ‘rivet’ marks on the butt-joints; it is also remarkable for the frames within the image – a background of paintings and looking-glasses repeated in a receding vista, as though to encapsulate past time and memories by capturing them in frames.

Only Fanny herself is not captured; her head has no reflection in the overmantel glass behind her. She stands between the painted frames and the great gold halo of the real frame like a sorrowful queen, and the combination of colour in the composition and the gilt portal with its star-shaped corners has something of the ‘semi-barbaric splendour’ of Hunt’s Finding of the Saviour... Once more we are looking at something very far indeed from a contemporary academic setting; something that is almost art deco in design – massive, plain, un-Victorian, and profoundly avant-garde.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), George Waugh, c.1869-74, o/panel, 40 x 32 cm., Tennants Auction, 15 July 2023, Lot 1171

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Harold Rathbone, 1893, o/panel, 23.2 x 17.8 cm., Walker Museum, Liverpool

The provenance of both these portraits means that they have a high chance of being in Hunt’s own choice of frame. The faux tortoiseshell was probably designed to harmonize with the portraits and continue the artist’s liking for rich and vivid colours, but – looking at the lavish use of black-painted ripple and ripple-like mouldings – it may also be an historic quotation, looking back to Rembrandt and his peers, and the way that 19th century dealers and collectors imagined that their work was originally framed.

This might be combined with an equal and opposite wish to accept new materials, in the spirit of Hunt’s avant-garde youth. The 1870s saw factories opening in both America and Britain where an early version of plastic – cellulose nitrate or celluloid – was manufactured. This replaced animal products such as ivory and tortoiseshell, which were growing more costly and difficult to obtain, and became immediately very popular and widely available [13]. Its use by Hunt means that the portrait of his dead brother-in-law, George Waugh, was not framed immediately on completion, but that this could have happened from about 1880 onwards.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910),  Cyril Benoni Holman Hunt (The fisherman), 1880, 60.9 x 50.8 cm.,  Fitzwilliam Museum

Hunt’s portrait of his 12 to 13 year-old son was given a spectacularly decorative and unusual frame, with an architrave profile consisting mainly of the wide frieze, with its relief pattern of undulating apple branches, apples (one of which is cut), and blossom, all arranged on a punched and gilded ground. In some ways this looks back to Millais’s frame for Collins’s Convent thoughts, made almost thirty years earlier; in others it looks forward to the Arts and Crafts movement, which would be inaugurated eight years later with C.R. Ashbee’s Guild of Handicrafts (see below).

When the portrait was hung in the 1880 exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, Lady Lindsay, one of the two founders with her husband, Sir Coutts Lindsay, thought that,

‘The frame of this picture is perhaps the most marvellous part of it.’ [14]

Not everyone agreed with her; Lewis Day wrote of it:

‘Still even in England there is a danger of tasteless extravagance; witness the frame of a portrait by an eminent and earnest painter, exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery not long since, on which were modelled the branches of an apple tree tinted in imitation of nature. Not content with fruit and foliage, the artist represented even the section of an apple, with core and pips complete. It is to be hoped there was in all this, some symbolic intention which (to the painter at least) excused this eccentricity…’ [15]

Holman Hunt, The fisherman, 1880, detail of cut apple on bottom rail (top); Rossetti, Astarte Syriaca, 1877, medallions on left-hand rail (bottom)

The cut apple may show the influence of Rossetti’s medallion frames, neatly reversing Hunt’s own influence on the latter, since Rossetti’s design has been compared to a cut fruit.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), drawing for the frame of Cyril Benoni Holman Hunt, c.1880, ink, 17.8 x 22.2 cm., Ashmolean Museum

Hunt was obviously very closely involved with the late plaster reliefs which were produced as models for the background of The Lady of Shalott, and he was photographed working on a life-size plaster head for The Light of the World [16]; however, modelling is very different from carving, and it is probable that he drew a more finished version of the two sketches above, and that it was realized by his regular framemaker and then gilded. It was almost certainly Hunt who then painted the fruit, flowers and leaves in naturalistic colours.

Holman Hunt, Cyril Benoni Holman Hunt (The fisherman), 1880, 60.9 x 50.8 cm.

Hans Thoma (1839-1924), Self-portrait, 1880, o/c, 70.5 x 51 cm., Albertinum, Dresden

It is interesting to see that the serial self-portraitist (almost as prolific as Rembrandt), Hans Thoma, painted himself in 1880, the same year that Hunt finished the portrait of his son. The portrait is posed equally close to the frame, holding a bible, the symbol of his piety, just as Cyril Hunt holds a fishing rod to indicate that the toys of a child are being replaced by the sports of men. Both figures are set against a background of trees and water, and Thoma stands under a canopy of apple branches as though he can personally reverse the Fall of Man. Perhaps Cyril is equally threatened by the apples on his frame; Judith Bronkhurst notes that the cut fruit may also relate to the Fall and the subsequent loss of innocence [17].

Thoma, another artist passionately interested, like Hunt, in the framing of his work, has provided his self-portrait with an architrave frame copiously decorated with flowers (possibly by his wife). It is one of those coincidences which sees inventions of exactly the same form, or medical discoveries in the same area, occurring simultaneously in widely different locations.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The school of Nature (originally a portrait of Gladys Holman Hunt), 1893-94; repainted from a model, 1904-05, o/panel, 122.6 x 98.3 cm., and detail, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico

The frame for the portrait of Hunt’s daughter, Gladys, is – unusually – carved from mahogany. Like the faux tortoiseshell frames illustrated above, with their possible hint of the Dutch Golden Age, this choice of an exotic hardwood, dark in colour and with beautiful graining, may be Hunt’s version of the 17th century ebony frame. The size of the portrait would probably have precluded ebony itself because of the cost, and mahogany was a fashionable substitute – although it was rarely used for frames, and by the late 19th century it had become more expensive due to over-harvesting. However, apart from its appearance it had the advantages of immunity from pests, resistance to warping, and relative ease of carving, all of which might make it desirable for framing a large painting with an ornamental border.

Holman Hunt, The school of Nature, detail

The flowers carved in the frieze are large, fat buds, on the point of bursting open; they are almost certainly paeonies. Tree paeonies had arrived in 1787 in the flesh, as it were, in Kew Gardens [18], following on their images on imported Chinese wallpaper; during the 19th century they were cultivated, hybridized, and became a fashionable craze in Victorian England. In the language of flowers they signified romance and modesty, or bashfulness; in Christian symbolism, as the Pentecost Rose they stand for resurrection or new life, and love for God. Given Hunt’s enthusiasm for symbols, he probably saw them as appropriate for what was originally an image of his 16 year-old daughter – emblems of bashfulness, love of God, and new life.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), drawing of frame designs, c.1868, 35.5 x 35 cm., and detail, Fitzwilliam Museum

No particularly close drawing for the frame seems to have surfaced, but the rather graceless lateral vines may have made a brief, unfinished appearance in a sketch made twenty-five years earlier.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), drawing of frame design, ink, 8.3 x 5.7 cm., Ashmolean Museum

Otherwise the ornament shares in all the exploratory sketches for pomegranates, which the spherical opening flowers very much resemble (for some reason the drawing above is described as a ‘guilloche incorporating a star pattern’, when it is visually foliate scrolling enriched with opening flowers – probably paeonies).

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Portrait of Dante Gabriel Rossetti aged 22, 1882-83, o/panel, 30.2 x 22.9 cm., Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), study for the frame of Dante Gabriel Rossetti aged 22, annotated with measurements of the sight, 1882-83, pen-&-ink, 9.8 x 12.7 cm., Ashmolean Museum

Rossetti had died in 1882, which is presumably when Hunt decided to paint the portrait of his friend and Pre-Raphaelite Brother from a drawing made in 1853 (when the members of the Brotherhood all drew each other). The painting was aggrandized as a sort of memorial by a rather toned-down Italian Mannerist-style frame, which provides the relatively small oval portrait with acres of gilded inlay and moulding, as though in its own private chapel, and ensures that the size of the painting will be no bar to its being noticed.

The sketch which seems linked to the setting for this portrait is dated to the same period; it is much more like a late 16th or 17th century Italian frame in its proportions, and may have begun life as the record of a genuine Mannerist frame. It also relates to the first, lost frame for Amaryllis or The shepherdess (see also the frame for the small version of The Lady of Shalott, below) – a picture which was successively repainted over ten years, from 1883/84 to 1893, and emerged with a different frame, as well.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Amaryllis (The shepherdess), 1883-93, o/panel, 63.8 x 50.3 cm., private collection

Unlike the frame for Rossetti’s portrait, where the apron has been done away with and the S-scrolling lateral brackets have been reduced to polite little ears, the outer part of this first frame for Amaryllis rejoices in its Mannerist origins – the prominent scrolls (enhanced with Rococo ribbons), the curlicues of the apron, and a wide, although unsatisfyingly shallow, cornice. These elements are arranged in a sort of thin rind around the inner NeoClassical rectilinear frame, creating a rather bizarre hybrid, and the critical reception of the painting at all stages over the decade it was painted and repainted may have been increased by the strangeness of the work as a whole in its setting [19].

The frame, like the mischievously quizzical gaze of the elfin shepherdess and her pearl-entangled hair, has vanished; the former has been replaced, apparently by the deep moulding frame seen on the left of a view of Hunt’s studio (see note 20), and the latter by a fin-de-siècle Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

Later sacred paintings and their frames

Hunt’s versatility in design saw him adapting the kind of carved architectural mouldings traditionally used for picture frames (leaf-&-dart, egg-&-dart, ribbon-&-stave, astragal-&-beads), in the patterns for two of his largest religious works, and adding his own symbolic motifs on the frieze. In this case they were pomegranates for resurrection – fruit, flowers and leaves – which Hunt commissioned in two variations around the giltwood frames of the two versions of The triumph of the Innocents. The earlier Liverpool frame was carved for him in 1878 by a ‘Mr Goodwin’ (almost certainly Charles, brother of the artist Albert Goodwin, a pupil of Hunt [20]).

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The triumph of the Innocents, 1876-87, o/c, 157.5 x 247.7 cm., Walker, National Museums Liverpool

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The triumph of the Innocents, 1883-84, o/c, 156.2 x 254 cm., Tate Britain

The Tate version is a replica, painted seven years or more after the first; its frame may also have been made by Goodwin.  The pattern of pomegranates alternating with half scrolled leaves on the frieze is very similar, although the pomegranates on the Tate frame are more naturalistic than the smooth abstracted ovals on the Walker frame, and so are the flowers.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), drawing of frame design, second half 19th century, pencil, brown chalk, ink, 21.3 x 26.2 cm., Ashmolean Museum

There are a number of drawings surviving amongst Hunt’s work which feature pomegranates, their flowers, and variations on their foliage – some of them stylized into scrolling or undulating running patterns along a straight frieze or bent round the corner of a frame joint, some of them more naturalistic. The ornamental drawings in general include examples where the artist seems to be noting ideas, working them out, or trying different variants on a theme, so that they may indicate a particular frame, could suggest more than one design, or may never have got further than the sketch. This one (above), which fits the fruit and a scrolling acanthus leaf into the corner of a cassetta beside a leaf-&-dart moulding, may be an initial idea for The triumph of the Innocents.

Drawings of pomegranates: (left) Gerrit Schouten (1779-1839), watercolour of fruit, foliage and flowers, 1823, Surinaams Museum, Paramaribo; (top right) Holman Hunt, beginning of detailed drawing for framemaker of Triumph of Innocents frame (Liverpool version); (bottom) Holman Hunt, sketch of pomegranate flower, Ashmolean Museum https://collections.ashmolean.org/object/734349

There is another drawing which is much further down the developmental path, laid out in the beginnings of a form which the framemaker could actually work from – above, right – with an astragal-&-bead moulding near the sight edge, and the ornamental frieze set above large beading or ovolos, and a leaf-&-dart [21]. The coloured botanic drawing (above, left), by Gerrit Schouten, is included to show the characteristic scalloped edges of the pomegranate leaves, which Hunt uses as they grow, along a twig, but cleverly curls two facing twigs into the shape of a pomegranate fruit. The central roundel, which is barely suggested in his drawing, sets two cruciform arrangements of the flowers on top of each other, thus getting in a crucifixion reference alongside the pomegranate fruit’s promise of resurrection.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), details from the frames of (left) The triumph of the Innocents, 1876-87, Liverpool, and (right) The triumph of the Innocents, 1883-84, Tate Britain

Three centred round medallions contain a wheel of pomegranate flowers on the top and lateral rails, with a scrolled leaf medallion at the bottom (Liverpool); all the centred medallions on the Tate frame are in the scrolled leaf pattern. Both frames alternate pomegranates with the double curled leaf forms, with pomegranate flowers between each motif. Hunt’s treatment of these ornaments, which are symbolic but also highly decorative, looks forward to the sinuous S-scrolls of Art Nouveau. The centre medallions with scrolled leaves are especially twining and stylized, but at the same time they form two eye-like shapes with their central volutes above a tear-drop nose (top right), in a reminiscence of the mediaeval Green Man found in church carvings and on Auricular frames.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Christ among the doctors, 1886-87 & 1890, watercolour, 64.8 x 125.7 cm., Leicester City Museum

Hunt’s frame for the watercolour, Christ among the doctors, uses an overall imbricated fish-scale pattern on the frieze, cast, like the ornament of The lanternmaker’s courtship nearly thirty years before, in compo.

Italian giltwood 16th century tondo frame with imbricated scale ornament at the back edge, 160 cm. diam., Artcurial, Paris, 20 April 2016, Lot 47

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), drawing of frames in a gallery, second half 19th century, 13.3 x 10.2 cm., Ashmolean Museum

Scale ornament had been used on frames since the late 15th century, at least, and Hunt had copied it from the fragment of a Roman frieze in the Munich Glyptothek, as well as from a frame in the collection of studies above.

Holman Hunt, Christ among the doctors, detail

Dosso Dossi (fl. c. 1486-1542), The Lamentation, c.1517-18, o/panel, 36.5 x 30.5 cm., National Gallery, NG4032

He may also have seen this pattern on his travels, moulded in pastiglia and applied to the whole frieze of a frame – generally ascribed to Venice, but probably used more widely in Italy, and later applied by dealers and collectors to small Renaissance portraits and scenes [22].   Peter Schade, head of framing at the National Gallery, London, has suggested that these small pastiglia frames might originally have held paintings of the Stations of the Cross, and that this might explain why there are so many, in varying patterns (each church requiring fourteen of them). At the time that Hunt was travelling through Italy, there might still have been sets of these remaining inside churches and visitable convents, where he would have seen them associated with scenes from Christ’s Passion [23].

Francesco Botticini (fl. 1446-97), Assumption of the Virgin, c.1475-76, tempera/ panel, 228.6 x 377.2 cm., National Gallery

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Gloria in excelsis, or The vision of the shepherds, 1892, watercolour & white, 53.3 x 37.8 cm., Northampton Museums

In 1892 Hunt painted another watercolour, Gloria in excelsis, or The vision of the shepherds, which might have been inspired by the National Gallery’s acquisition, ten years earlier, of Botticini’s Assumption of the Virgin. This has a giltwood frame with an undulating garland of Canterbury bells applied on the punched frieze (the pins which attach it have become visible over time), an ornament which was repeated for the frame of The importunate neighbour (o/c) in 1895-98. There was apparently a watercolour study of Canterbury bells made c.1892, but it has vanished [24].

Sadly, the Gloria was painted too early for the frame to have been influenced by the carol, ‘Ding dong merrily on high’, which was only published in 1924. Similarly, Hunt was unlikely to have known all the flowers associated in folklore with the Madonna (the Canterbury bell was supposedly her nightcap [25]); but in general, the Victorian meaning of this flower was everlasting love and gratitude, making it appropriate for God’s gift of His son, and the gratitude of the shepherds, and in the case of The importunate neighbour for the charity which gives to a neighbour and the neighbour’s gratitude. It is the reverse of the warning bells on The awakening conscience of 1853, and it is also very decorative.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The Beloved, 1873-98, o/c/panel, 62 x 50.7 cm., Royal Collection Trust

This work is included only for the frame; to see more than appears above of the blasphemously unpleasant painting, the link is in the caption. The frame is an aedicule from which all the architectural features have been stripped away, save for a vestigial cornice and plinth. It is vaguely reminiscent of Alma-Tadema’s frame for his Cleopatra (1877), probably because of the lack of pilasters and capitals and the presence of the winged motif, although it is unlikely that Hunt ever saw that frame. His own design is based on scrolling pomegranate branches (for resurrection), with serried ranks of leaves at the centre of the base, roundels of further leaves, flowers and small fruit, and larger pomegranates and leafy tendrils reaching up the sides. Wheels of mignonette flowers fill two of the scrolls; here they probably signify submission to the will of God.

The frame for The Light of the World, c.1900-04, can be found under its maker, Hilda Hewlett, née Herbert, in the article ‘Women in picture framing’, by Jacob Simon.

Repoussé copper frames

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), May Morning on Magdalen Tower, 1888-91 and 1895, frame 1889, o/c, 154.5 x 200 cm., Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight

In 1888 Hunt began to work on two versions of a subject he had wanted to paint for many years – perhaps from as early as 1851, when he visited Magdalen College in Oxford. He saw it both as the celebration and preservation of a peculiarly English ceremony, and as an allegory of religious faith expressed through a symbolic worship of the sun. It records the service held on the first of May, on top of the tower of Magdalen College chapel, when the choir greets the dawn with hymns and madrigals. In the 17th century the diarist Anthony Wood had noted that members of the College choir

‘…do, according to an ancient custom, salute Flora at four in the morning with vocal music of several parts…’

The historicizing aspect of the event in the 19th century fitted with Hunt’s idea of a composition which would convey its antiquity: the hint about Flora gave him a reason for including the piles of flowers in the foreground, and linked both to a supposed Druidic practice of welcoming the spring, and to the ancient Mithraic cult of sun-worship (Hunt’s composition includes the figure of a Parsee, a worshipper of the Persian Mithras, god of the morning sun.). These varied, if slightly confused, threads inspired the natural imagery of the two frames he designed for the large and small versions of the painting.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), May morning on Magdalen Tower, 1888-93, o/c, 38.8 x 48.9 cm., Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery

The small canvas in Birmingham began life in as the study en plein air made by Hunt on top of the tower at dawn, from which the background of the other, larger painting was taken. Its frame was the second to be designed and executed, in 1889-90, and is a clever remaking of a Renaissance tondo frame; the outer fruit-&-flower garland of the latter turned into an art nouveau braid of scrolling half-leaves, with a lark at the top centre, whilst the whole of the infill between the outer frame and the oblong sight edge has become a shimmering sunburst. The scrolls which float across these rays are inscribed with the title of the picture at the top, and at the bottom a quotation from Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale:

‘AND FYRY PHEBUS RYSETH UP SO BRIGHTE/
THAT AL THE ORIENT LAUGHETH OF THE LIGHTE.’ [26]

Both frames were made at the Guild of Handicraft, an extraordinary institution which had only recently been founded by the 25 year-old Charles Ashbee, who had just left Cambridge inspired by Ruskin’s ideas, and set up classes for working men in the East End of London. The classes included the study of Ruskin’s writings, as well as drawing, design, and practical crafts. Holman Hunt encouraged this project and helped Ashbee practically by giving him the commissions for both the May Morning frames during the first precarious year of the Guild.

It was established in 1888 in Commercial Street, with just a handful of men, including C.V. Adams, a cabinetmaker, John Pearson, who was already skilled in metalwork, Fred Hubbard, and John Williams, neither of whom apparently had any skills [27]. But extraordinarily it was Williams who – with less than a year’s experience – executed both Holman Hunt’s picture frames from the artist’s designs. It seems that he must have learned from Pearson, and learned remarkably quickly: so quickly, in fact, that he was already able to exhibit one item of metalwork at the Guild’s first exhibition at the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society in October 1888 [28].

Holman Hunt, May Morning on Magdalen Tower, detail of frame, bottom corners, left and right

The use of decorative imagery which is naturalistic in its detail and stylized in its repetitive rhythms is common both to the work of Pearson and Williams, and to Hunt’s frame designs.  All three of them use scrolling or undulating flowers and leaves which have a particular internal scale, a relationship between large and small motifs, and a tension of geometric pattern and representational likeness quite different from the scrolling foliate ornaments used in classical, Renaissance, and NeoClassical decoration.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), study of lilies, watercolour, 39 x 30 cm., Sotheby’s, 14 July 2021, Lot 62

Williams turned out to be Hunt’s perfect partner for creating the two copper frames. He would have been provided with detailed drawings for all the various sections of the large frame, and Hunt must have executed numbers of drawings and watercolours which no longer survive. A study of lilies related to May Morning has – in the stem of buds on the left – more in common with the lilies on the left-hand rail of the frame than with the flowers in the painting [29]. The whole design is quite complex, and its execution must have stretched Williams’s skills considerably.  It represents the four elements: earth – the lilies and briars roses growing up the frame on the left, and the morning glories and sunflowers on the right; air – nesting birds in the top corners, and the lark ascending against the crescent moon in the top centre; water – leaping fish and frogs at the bottom; and fire – the sun rising majestically at the bottom centre.

All these motifs are on the wide central frieze, which was made in a separate section from the top edge, with its floral, starfish and star motifs, and from the inner moulding.  This is because each section has a core of wood around which the sheets of copper are wrapped, in order to give support and stability to the thin metal shell. The creation of such a structure was completely experimental, but of a piece with the optimism and persistence which had founded and was maintaining the Guild. Hunt himself had been nervous about the results, but in the end his letter to Ashbee, after taking delivery of the large frame in April 1889, expressed his entire satisfaction:

‘I have been so continually occupied since the frame came that until now I could write nothing to express correctly my general high satisfaction at the result of our experiment with the repoussée [sic] copper.  As a material for the design I made for the frame there was a certain venturesomeness in its use… now I view its effect on the painting I regard the work with great pleasure… there is reason to believe that we have made a success in our venture and that not only to artistic people – and the outside world in future years but even to the general public of this day which will tend rapidly to extend the demand for the hammered copper decoration.’ [30]

Holman Hunt, May Morning on Magdalen Tower, detail of frame, top left and bottom centre

He was happy for it to be exhibited without the painting, which was still unfinished, in the 1889 Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society – just a year after John Williams’s appearance there with his first exhibition piece. An unidentified press cutting in the V & A gives its first outing a magnificent review:

‘…A very happy idea has occurred to Mr Holman Hunt with respect to the framing of the canvas…. he has devised a new frame of dull, beaten copper.  This metal, showing the marks of the hammer upon it, forms an admirable and reticent setting, indefinite in colour, and free from the stereotyped features of the joiner’s mouldings and mitred corners.  Mr Hunt has gone a step further and has had the frame decorated with a design symbolical of the idea of the picture.  Thus, below we have the rising sun, on either side of which are ‘frogs and fishes awakening into joyous life’.  On the upright members are growing and flowering plants, and above all birds and butterflies.  The whole design is treated conventionally, and hammered into low relief by the workers of Toynbee Hall – a very creditable piece of craftsmanship.’ [31]

The last frame

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), with Edward Robert Hughes (1851-1914), The Lady of Shalott, c.1888-1905, o/c, 188.3 x 146.4 cm., Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford

Hunt’s last great frame was completed five years before his death in 1910, for The Lady of Shalott, c.1888-1905, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, which he painted with the help of Edward Hughes. It has an aedicular, temple-like form, which had become very popular with the so-called Olympian painters in the last quarter of the century. They (Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones, Poynter) each used a small number of patterns repeatedly on their work, however, whereas Hunt’s frame is a unique (and uniquely beautiful) creation, designed – like all his frames – to support and intensify the theme of this particular painting. The columns are twined with briars, connecting the Lady to that other imprisoned heroine, Sleeping Beauty, and the scrolling anthemia or honeysuckles at the bottom spring from a funerary urn.

This hint of her end impelled Hunt to expand the story beyond the confines of the painting:

‘It was suggested to me that the fate of the Lady was too pitiful: I had Pandora’s Box with Hope lying hid carved upon the frame.’ [32]

The artist Frederic Shields had met Ford Madox Brown and Rossetti in 1864, when they were in a full creative flow of frame design, and (not very successfully) attempted his own northern Gothic frame[33]. Hunt now called on him for help, as Shields recorded:

‘To Holman Hunt’s to design smoke for his frame for “Lady of Shalott”’[34]

The smoke – the escaping evils which had filled Pandora’s box – scrolls up in serpents of cloud, like the Lady’s hair and like the threads of her tapestry, unleashed by her own curiosity… but Hope (SPES) remains in the carved box.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The Lady of Shalott, c.1887-92, tempera & oil/ panel, 44.5 x 34.1 cm., Manchester City Art Gallery

The small version of the Lady of Shalott, which seems to have been begun as an experimental ground for the large work, was finished when sold, and was given a frame similar to the one made for Rossetti’s portrait some years before. Without the oval inlay used for the portrait, and with a rainsill at the bottom of the sight edge, it creates a window through which the viewer – rather strangely occupying the space seen in the looking-glass on the opposite wall, which looks down to Sir Lancelot – looks in at the Lady. The frieze at top and bottom is inscribed with the lines from Tennyson’s poem which apply to Sir Lancelot and to the curse which he has unconsciously loosed on the Lady. The cornice is mounted with carved anthemia acroteria.

Prints

Prints of his paintings were an important source of income both for Hunt and for the dealers who bought his paintings and sent them on tour around the country (and occasionally further afield, to the US and Australia).

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), The shadow of death, 1873-74, o/ panel, 104.5 x 82 cm., Art Institute of Chicago

For example, Agnews of Bond Street bought both versions of The shadow of death, plus a further copy for the engraver to work from: this had its own artist’s frame (above), with outset corners holding passion flowers for the Passion of Christ, and a twining frieze of acanthus leaves in the hollow. Together with all three framed paintings, Hunt sold the overall copyright for a total of 10,000 guineas (£10,500) [35]. The prints, by Frederick Stacpoole, were published in 1878, and over five years of sales brought Agnews more than £20,000.

Hunt had previously sold The finding of the Saviour to Ernest Gambart, dealer and publisher of prints, who bought it in instalments from 1860-61, along with the copyright, for £5,500.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), example of the frame adapted by F.G. Stephens for engravings of The finding of the Saviour, c.1867, carved & gilded oak (missing the inscribed ivory-coloured inlay), 84.8 x 108.6 cm., Christie’s, London, 4 May 2007, Lot 128

Holman Hunt (after; 1827-1910), a damaged example of the same print frame for The finding of the Saviour, c.1867, carved & gilded oak, retaining the inscribed inlay, Reeman Dansie, Colchester, 1 August 2017, Lot 985

Frederick Stephens designed a frame for signed proofs from the resulting engravings, based on the artist’s own frames for the two versions of the painting. It was a gilded oak plate frame with no mouldings at the contour or sight edge – just a flat frieze – but it had most of the symbols from the model carved in a simplified form and applied to the wooden base. It even included a white-painted inlay, imitating the original ivory inlays, which carried the inscriptions of the latter. A beautifully conserved and complete example in the collection of Gill & Lagodich, New York, is discussed on their website, with close-up details of the ornament.  Prints in these frames apparently sold for 15 guineas each (£15.15s 0d or £15.75) [36].

Holman Hunt (after; 1827-1910), The triumph of the Innocents, photogravure, 1888, frame designed by C.R. Ashbee, c. 102 x 132 cm., Manchester City Art Gallery

A unique frame was designed by Charles Ashbee for a photogravure of The Triumph of the Innocents (Manchester CAG). This was commissioned by T.C. Horsfall for the Manchester Art Museum, Ancoats, founded in 1886 by Horsfall with the aim of ‘ennobling the poor through art’. In 1888, Horsfall asked Ashbee for a beautifully-framed copy of some edifying subject, and Ashbee – whose Guild of Handicraft was, of course, already receiving support from Hunt – chose The Triumph of the Innocents. He designed a classical aedicular frame for it, parcel-gilt, in stained and polished wood, which close-frames the photogravure like a small altarpiece. It is quite large – about a metre across; it has a deep entablature with small architectural mouldings picked out in gold, and the title in gilded capitals on the frieze. The pilasters are decorated with gilded carved relief panels of scrolling foliage and fruit, including grapes and pomegranates, and there is a predella panel holding an illuminated quotation from Ruskin’s The art of England, ch. I, describing the picture.

Holman Hunt (1827-1910), one of three drawings for frame designs, Bonhams, 19 November 2008, Lot 13

Hunt himself may well have had a hand in the design (a drawing of frames and elements of frames was sold in a group of three by Bonhams in 2008, one sketch of which is close to the scrolling foliage and fruit of the pilasters, although dated 1875), and it may also have been the production of this frame which confirmed him in giving the work of the two May Morning frames to the Guild of Handicraft.

Holman Hunt (after; 1827-1910),  The Light of the World, 1905, chromolithographic print published by the Fine Art Society, London, 72.5 x 38.7 cm., Stair Galleries, Hudson, New York, 24 June 2017, Lot 166

The Fine Art Society in Bond Street, London, sold contemporary art from the time of its establishment in 1876, and held exhibitions of the artists it represented, but it also published engravings of their work – an important source of income for the gallery, just as it was for Agnew’s and Gambart.  This is a late print, produced five years before Hunt’s death, and taking advantage of a process which had been available since the mid-19th century, but which was opposed to a large extent for reproducing fine art, because of a perceived devaluation of the works involved. However, the frame indicates that this was sold as something superior to a mere coloured reproduction: perhaps closer to Gambart’s engraving of The finding of the Saviour in Stephens’s frames. There is no indication as to whether this would have been approved by Hunt, but it is certainly evidence of the popularity of The Light of the World.

Framemakers

Frames for Hunt were a serious business; they were given equal consideration with the paintings with which they formed a symbiotic and supporting partnership, equal research and preparatory sketches, and equal care in their manufacture. The latter included the two main businesses in London which, from the mid-19th century, were capable of supplying the craftsmanship and the traditional and innovatory skills needed by the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle – Joseph Green, later W.A. Smith, and Foord & Dickinson. Hunt used Green from the early 1850s, diverging to Foord & Dickinson at times, but coming back to Green in the late 1860s when Green may have been under financial pressure through illness [37].

W.A Smith, who acquired his business in 1871, may have started out as one of Green’s sub-contractees, as he was working as a carver of reverse boxwood moulds (for making compo ornament) in 1861. He may be the ‘shifty and mysterious… wiseacre’ whom Rossetti mentioned as running Green’s business as early as 1868; he may also be ‘one of the men there [who] carves in after hours’ in Hunt’s words, given his earlier mould-carving career. Hunt used Foord & Dickinson for much of the 1870s, but gave work to Smith in the 1870s too, and through the 1880s; he also used Frederick Buck for the frame of The Beloved, and Chapman Bros for the frame of The bride of Bethlehem [38].

Talented framemakers were at a premium after the long decline in carving and gilding skills caused by the depredations of war, recession and industrialization, and some of the second wave Pre-Raphaelites (Strudwick, Spenser Stanhope and Evelyn De Morgan) resorted to having their frames carved in Florence. But the work generated in England by the original PRB, and by Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones and Poynter, Albert Moore and Whistler, enabled a new creativity and the employment of skillful craftsmen. Holman Hunt was in the van of his peers in challenging and supporting such men, since his restless imagination was continually producing new and avant-garde designs, tailored specifically to particular paintings, and forming with them a complete work of art. In this context, the continued reproduction of his paintings without their frames is inexcusable and insupportable, and a blot upon art historical publishing.

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Other frames designed by Hunt:

The schoolgirl’s hymn, 1859, 35 x 25 cm., Ashmolean Museum

London Bridge on the night of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, 1863, 65 x 98 cm., Ashmolean Museum

Festival of St Swithin, 1865-66, 73 x 91 cm., Ashmolean Museum

Tuscan girl plaiting straw, 1868-69, 52.1 x 41.9 cm., Sotheby’s, 4 December 2013, Lot 49

Bianca, 1869, 87.3 x 67 cm., Worthing Museum & Art Gallery

Bride of Bethlehem, 1885, 50.8 x 41.3 cm.

Athens: Piazza della Constituzione, c.1892-93, Christie’s, 13 July 2023, Lot 86

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[1] Sir George Beaumont (1753-1827), one of the prime instigators of the National Gallery, London, had recommended that landscapes be the brown ‘of an old Cremona fiddle’.

[2] Sicut lilium inter spinas, sic amica mea inter filias…: ‘As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters…..’, The Song of Solomon, 2:2

[3] J.G. Millais, The life and letters of Sir John Everett Millais, Bart, London, 1899, vol. I, p.100

[4] Letter from Hunt, 1897; quoted by Julian Treuherz, Pre-Raphaelite paintings from the Manchester City Art Gallery, Manchester, 1980, pp.37-38.

[5] Judith Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt: a catalogue raisonné, 2006; see entry for the frame of the study for The finding of the Saviour in the temple, vol. II, D173

[6] F.G. Stephens, W. Holman Hunt and his works, London, 1860, p.34

[7] Proverbs 25:20

[8] Instead of the diagonal mitre joint used on nearly all frames since the late 17th century, the butt joint has the two rails of a frame abut each other at right angles, leaving the joint visible as a horizontal or a vertical line at the front

[9] From the review of the Free Exhibiton in the Athenaeum, quoted by W.M. Rossetti, D.G.Rossetti: His family letters, London, 1895, vol.I, p.143. Both paintings were later reframed by Rossetti

[10] The conservation work was carried out by Victoria Jones at Liverpool in 2010.

[11] Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1905, vol. II, p. 193. The ‘ivory flat’ or inlay is inscribed with the title of the painting and with biblical texts

[12] Hunt’s drawing for medallion and borders is reproduced in Bronkhurst, ibid., vol. II, p. 167, D333

[13] See ‘Tortoiseshell: real or fake?’ at haircomb.co.uk

[14] Bronkhurst, op.cit., vol. I, p. 244

[15] Lewis F. Day, Every-day art: short essays on the arts not fine, 1882, Batsford, London

[16] Bronkhurst, op.cit., vol. II, p. 292

[17] Ibid., vol. I, p. 244

[18] See Alexandra Loske, ‘Hidden Nature: flower power from the far East…‘, Brighton & Hove Museums

[19] The coloured montage of the early Amaryllis and its first frame is based on the black-&-white illustration in F.W. Farrar & Mrs Meynell, William Holman Hunt: his life and work,  1893, Art Journal, p. 27. The painting now looks like this, and the frame apparently like this glimpse of it at the left-hand side of a view of Hunt’s studio in 1893

[20] Information from Jacob Simon, whose entry on Charles Goodwin has now been added to the Directory of British picture framemakers on the NPG website. Hunt used Goodwin because he ‘can work to pattern at less than £1000 per frame’.

[21] The finished drawings given to framemakers down the centuries have hardly ever (possibly never) survived, because, even though they may be used more than once, they are ephemeral things which don’t survive the framemaker shutting his workshop

[22] See ‘National Gallery, London: a Venetian pastiglia frame‘ [23] Judith Bronkhurst notes that ‘the fish was understood as a sign for Christ as early as the second century’, and that Hunt was using the scale ornament to emphasize that the foreground figure was the young Christ; Bronkhurst, op.cit., vol. II, p. 181

[24] Ibid., vol. II,p. 199

[25] Alma & Harold Moldenke, Plants of the Bible, 1952

[26] Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ‘The Knight’s Tale’, ll.1493-94.

[27] Alan Crawford, ‘The object is not the object: C.R. Ashbee and the Guild of Handicraft’, in Pioneers of Modern Craft, ed. Margot Coatts, Manchester University Press, 1997, p.2

[28] Crawford, C.R. Ashbee: …, op. cit., ch. 12. See more about the Guild and John Williams at ‘Poetry and the frame: May Morning on Magdalen Tower…‘

[29] Bronkhurst, op. cit., vol II, p. 186

[30] V & A (86.DD.17A):  Letters from William Morris… to C.R. Ashbee, MSS, English; Letter from Holman Hunt to Ashbee, 19 May 1889.

[31] Ibid.; newspaper cutting, c. October 1889.

[32] Hunt’s note for the exhibition of the painting in Manchester, 1906.

[33] For Kneeling woman, 1860s, with Julian Hartnoll in 1980s.

[34] Shields’s diary, 3 March 1904, quoted by Ernestine Mills, The life & letters of Frederic Shields, 1912.

[35] Bronkhurst, vol.I, p.19

[36] Ibid., vol. II p.298, note 8

[37] Jacob Simon has discovered that Green (who employed ten men and a boy in 1861) by 1871 was almost certainly living in the Camberwell lunatic asylum 

[38] Bronkhurst, op. cit., vol. II, p. 323 and 340