Interior of a Stable, aka Boy in a Stable, aka, The Eavesdropper
Private Collection
Watercolor, bodycolor, gum arabic, and scratching out
29 5/8 X 21 1/2 inches, 75.3 X 54.6 cm
with inscription and number '12./The Eavesdropper./William Hunt' on a label attached to the backboard.
Provenance:
Charles Oddie by 1857;
John James (S) Christie's. 17 May 1873, Lot 35 (P) £546 to Agnew (dealer);
Thomas Agnew & Sons, Inv. No. 2041 (S) 30 June 1874 (P) J. & W. Vokins (dealer);
William Quilter (S) Christie's, 9 April 1875, Lot 229 (P) £787 10 s. Eley, but, in fact, bought in;
The late William Quilter (S) Christie's 19 May 1889, Lot 80 (P) £693 10s Agnew, acting on behalf of Harry Quilter;
Harry Quilter (d. July 1907);
Sir William Cuthbert Quilter (d. Nov 1911);
Edward Frederick Quilter (d. 1905) by 1903;
Quilter family, by descent (S) Christie's London, 20 Nov 2003, Lot 107 (P) £26,290, $44,640 by the current owner
In a review of the 1875 Quilter sale in The Times [of London] of 18 April 1875, it is stated that Hunt received only £40 for the watercolor when it was originally sold. Of course, that was £40 more than William Quilter obtained for the watercolor during his lifetime, since it was unsold in 1875.
Exhibited:
1839, London, Society of Painters in Water-Colours, Spring Exhibition, No. 92 [Interior of a Stable];
1857, Manchester, England, Exhibition of Art Treasures of Great Britain, No. 544 [Stable Boy, lent by Charles Oddie);
1878, Nottingham, England, No. 76, Lent by William Quilter.
1879-80, London, Fine Art Society, Ruskin Exhibition of Prout and Hunt, No. 121 [Mr. Quilter's Stable Boy/The Eavesdropper, lent by William Quilter].
This exceptional Hunt watercolor from 1838/39, which was included in Ruskin's exhibition of works by Samuel Prout and William Hunt, is an actual example of the type of watercolor which Ruskin considered to be within the highest, first class, of Hunt's work. It bears very little resemblance to the early watercolors in the Country People exhibition which are erroneously identified as being of the type most praised by the great art critic. This and the next three images, figs. B - D, are the actual watercolors identified and most highly praised by Ruskin in his Notes, and all date from the mid-1830s to 1850s, i.e., from the middle period of Hunt's career, after he had developed all of his techniques for accurately depicting the colors and textures of nature, as encountered daily in both urban and rustic settings.
No one would reasonably doubt that tastes in art vary by individual, and there will necessarily be differing opinions as to which were the artist's best works.But, if I were a betting man, I would wager that the vast majority of persons who encounter Hunt's art for the first time would greatly favor the artist's later single figures of both country and city life and his late still life subjects over his early depictions of rural workers rendered in brown ink outlines and almost monochromatic watercolor washes.
Yet his watercolors from the beginning of his career, painted in traditional 18th and early 19th century watercolor techniques, are still largely the focus of most studies on the history of British watercolors and exhibitions such as Country People. The organizers of the Courtauld exhibition should be commended, however, for presenting at least a small number of the type of watercolors which actually made Hunt famous and which still justify the conclusion that he was a major English watercolorist who greatly advanced techniques used in watercolor painting in 19th century Britain.
Lot Notes from 2003 sale:
The present watercolour is included in Ruskin's exhibition of Prout and Hunt at the Fine Art Society in 1879, where it is referred to by Ruskin as Mr Quilter's Stable Boy. Ruskin considered this type of watercolour as amongst the highest class of Hunt's work, 'Drawings illustrative of rural life in its vivacity and purity, without the slightest endeavour at idealisation ... All drawings belonging to this class are virtually faultless, and most of them very beautiful.' In addition Quilter op.cit. states, 'I remember Sir Frederick Burton saying many years ago to my father-perhaps in a fit of generous enthusiasm-that this is the finest water-colour in the world.'
During the late 1830s Hunt executed a series of works of barn interiors and outhouses. Hunt executed a watercolour of a similar interior with his wife as the model, entitled The Outhouse, (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) dated 1838 and illustrated in J. Witt, op.cit., p. 173, no. 321, pl. 15.
A similar watercolour showing a girl in a barn interior was sold Sotheby's, London, 10 April 1997, lot 113 (£51,000).
Exhibited:
1839, London, Society of Painters in Water-Colours, No. 92 (Interior of a Stable, sold prior to opening of exhibition);
1857, Manchester, Exhibition of Art Treasures of Great Britain , No. 544 (Stable Boy, lent by Charles Oddie);
1879-80, London, Fine Art Society, Exhibition of Prout and Hunt, No. 121 (Stable Boy, lent by W. Quilter)
Literature
E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin, 1904, vol. XIV, pp. 373-84 and 440-54.
H. Quilter, Preferences in Art, p. 182, illustrated p. 177.
J. Witt, William Henry Hunt (1790-1864) Life and Work with a Catalogue, London, 1982, pp. 254-5.
One of William Henry Hunt's major figure paintings, this large watercolor was exhibited at the 1839 Old Water Colour Society spring exhibition under the title Interior of a Stable. John Ruskin included it [No. 121, Mr. Quilter's Stable Boy] in his exhibition of the works of Samuel Prout and William Hunt in 1889-1890 at the Fine Art Society, a major Bond Street art dealer. Ruskin said of this painting: "... [Hunt] is here again in his utmost strength -- and in qualities of essential painting - unconquerable. In the pure faculty of the painter's art - in what Correggio, and Tintoret, and Velsquez, and Rubens, and Rembrandt, meant by painting - that single bunch of old horse collars is worth all of Messonier's horse-bridles, boots, beeches, epaulettes and stars, together."
Sir Frederick Burton, an accomplished painter and one-time director of the National Gallery of Art in London, stated, after Hunt's death, that this was "the finest water-colour in the world." And while that opinion might have been an overstatement, this is , without doubt, one of the most important, highest quality, and best preserved watercolors by Hunt. Large watercolors, i.e., those which could not be kept in albums, safe and away from light, typically have suffered some or, more often, a great deal of fading. For a watercolor which hung on a wall for over 170 years to retain virtually all the original color is a tribute to Hunt's choice of paint, his heavy use of gum arabic, and the density of his application of paint, i.e., thick application compared to what was typical of most earlier English artists who instead used thin washes of transparent color. Of equal or greater importance was the fact that one family owned this painting for at least 130 years and most likely hung the watercolor in an interior room, protected from the damaging affects of natural light.
The model for the painting was, most likely, William Swain (b. 1823) the older of two brothers from Hastings, England who served as models for a large number of the artist's works. But if the model is younger than 15 or so years old, which would have been Bill's age at the time this watercolor was painted, then this painting would instead show the younger brother and Hunt's most used model, John Swain (b. 1826). Both were children of a fisherman from Hastings, England, Zebulon Swain, and his fishmonger wife, Lucy Allard. Hunt would spend his winters working in Hastings, on the south coast, from about 1830 onward. It is almost always incorrectly said that there were three Swain brothers who served as Hunt's models. The two brothers of William and John were both too old to have been models for any of Hunt's famous pictures from the 1830s showing rustic boys. The eldest sibling, Edward Swain, was born in 1812 and would have been 27 when this work was painted, while Zebulon Swain, Jr., born in 1815, was already well into his teens when Hunt began to paint the two younger brothers in 1830. The fact that both Edward and Zebulon, Jr., were both still alive at the time of the artist's death in 1864, yet only William (Bill) and John were left some money in Hunt's will, is consistent with the conclusion that there only being two BOYS from the Swain family who were shown in the artist's figure subjects.
There were also two Swain sisters who might well have been the models for the two girls who appear in some of Hunt's paintings from the 1830s, e.g., The SIsters at the Huntington Library and Art Galleries in San Marino, CA, and The Fortune Teller, another large watercolor exhibited by Hunt in 1839 (under his original title for the work, Juvenile Palmistry. No direct evidence of the identities of these two girl models has yet surfaced, however.
A member of the Quilter family, Harry Quilter, was a solicitor (lawyer) and prominent art critic of the late 19th century. Although his discussion from 1892 of Hunt's painting techniques, as demonstrated in this watercolor, is somewhat wordy and at times a bit difficult to follow, it remains one of the best explanations of why Hunt was so successful at imitating the natural appearance of many objects in a single composition:
... look at the engraving which forms the frontispiece of this article, and is from William Hunt's most celebrated picture, The Eavesdropper -- a work which embodies all the best qualities of the painter and many of the most marked characteristics of English art. I remember Sir Frederic Burton saying many years ago to my father -- perhaps in a fit of generous enthusiasm -- that is the greatest water-colour the world. And some long while afterwards, when The Eavesdropper was exhibited at the Fine Art Society's Rooms in Bond Street, Ruskin wrote almost as strongly as the president of the National Gallery [Frederick Burton] had spoken. So at least there are some good judges who would endorse the present writer's opinion, for the work in question has long appeared to me to be the highest point to which water-colour painting has ever attained. Of course it is not a drawing in transparent colour only -- none indeed of Hunt's finest works are so executed -- and in the present instance a full use of body colour [opaque white] has been made throughout. The extraordinary excellence of this drawing, technically speaking, is in its preservation of the delicacy. brilliancy, and transparency of effect of mere water-colour, while the strength, solidity, and richness of a fine oil-painting are obtained by the dexterous use of opaque tints. Those who have studied technically the art of water-colour painting, especially in its later developments under such great artists as Walker and Pinwell, know that even in the very finest examples of the art there is scarcely to be found this union. In, for instance, the most admirable of the Fred Walker drawings, beautiful as they are in color and atmosphere, there is in the aspect of the paint itself some lack of transparency and brilliance -- they in no way suggest the white paper beneith; the colour might have been mixed like mortar and laid on with some most Liliputian trowel, of such mortar-like consistency is it. No trace of such deficiency, for deficiency it is, is to be found here. Alike in the opaque and transparent portions, the work appears transparent, fresh, and lively, and in the modelling and texture of the flesh especially is this to be seen -- where the delicacy of work has been so great and its result so exquisite, that it is almost impossible to mark the portions wherein the opaque colour has been used. In other parts of the picture, where the artist relied less upon delicacy than strength, the use of white is far more apparent, especially in the more brilliantly lighted details. The painting, for instance, of the boards which line this rough stable is a masterpiece of solid, almost rough painting, as large and free in method of work as if the artist had had a twenty-foot canvas in front of him. Without passage from the strong-lighted side of the picture to the shadow behind, the transparent colour comes into use again, and perhaps from a technical point of view the greatest triumph of the drawing is in the delineation of the old horse-colar and harness which hang in the shadow. [He stole this opinion from Ruskin, who praised the collar, but I strongly disagree with both critics - there are many areas which are more impressively painted -- the roughness of the wood around the window, the texture of the boy's jacket, and, above-all, the metallic lantern hanging down from above.] But apart from the mere handicraft of the picture, its supreme quality is the marvellous richness and beauty of the colour. This is at once deep and lustrous, full of subtle changes and pleasant contrasts, shifting each moment, or rather, in each smallest fraction of the composition, and presenting, when viewed as a whole, a piece of mingled tone and colour which might hang between a Rembrandt and a Titian without fearing the comparison.
Harry Quilter, Preferences in Art, Life, and Literature, London, S. Sonnenschein, 1892, pp. 182-183.
In my opinion, the watercolor of the Head Gardener which is the focus of the Courtauld Gallery's Country People Exhibit is not in the same league as watercolors such as the Eavesdropper, which truly represents the very best of Hunt's contributions to English watercolor painting.
