Il Dolce Far Niente

Begun in 1859, put aside and taken up again in 1865, and finally exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1867, this picture marked a radical departure for Hunt, as the title alone - with its Italian colloquial implication of ‘sweet idleness’ or ‘indolence’ indicates. No member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had been more single-minded than Hunt in his determination to paint serious subjects replete with meaning and moral significance. His early works, if they had not been based on the Bible or Shakespeare, had at least had this ethical dimension, and in 1854 he had taken this approach to its logical conclusion by going to the Holy Land to paint biblical events on the very spot where they had occurred. In stark contrast, Il Dolce Far Niente is essentially an essay in mood and formal values, lacking any ulterior motive and making no pretentions to preach. As Hunt himself put it many years later in his autobiography, ‘having long been engaged on works of scale below life-size, it seemed wise now to take up the painting of figures of full proportions. Through the kindness of friends a young lady sat to me, and I commenced a picture which I afterwards called “Il dolce far niente”… I was glad of the opportunity of exercising myself in work which had not any didactic purpose. The picture, however, had to be laid by for the time, and finished at a later period from another model.’

This account is somewhat disingenuous. The ‘young lady’ who sat to Hunt was in fact Annie Miller, a professional model of an independent nature whom Hunt met in a bar when she was fifteen and whom he hoped to educate and marry. Their fraught relationship ended acrimoniously at the end of 1859 because Annie refused to sever her connection with other artists. She caused a permanent rift between Hunt and Rossetti, who often used her as a model in the 1850s and early 1860s, notably in Helen of Troy (Hamburg Kunsthalle), a painting of 1863 which perfectly captures what Ford Madox Brown described as her ‘siren-like’ quality.

As Hunt states so obliquely in his reminiscences, Il Dolce Far Niente was far from finished when the split with Annie occurred. In fact, it was probably put aside for some years as a result of this crisis. When Hunt took the picture up again, his model was Fanny Waugh, the daughter of a prosperous London chemist whom he was to marry in December 1865. As Christopher Forbes noted, while the hair is recognisably Annie’s, the strong features and pronounced jaw are those of Fanny. In other words, it is a slightly disconcerting marriage which Hunt’s unflinching realism does nothing to minimise. However, now prominently placed on the sitter’s left hand is a betrothal ring – perhaps giving the painting a respectability and removing, for the high-minded Hunt, the shadow of the previous sitter.

Hunt also suggests in his account that the painting came about almost by accident, as if he was taking a break from more serious works. In fact, it is a very deliberate essay in the Aesthetic style of the 1860s, which he must have undertaken as a conscious tribute to prevailing trends. As Robyn Asleson observes in her article in the Christie’s catalogue accompanying the Forbes sale (London, 19 February 2003, p, 163): ‘Broadly stated, Aestheticism was the belief that beauty pursued for its own sake constituted the only appropriate aim of art, and that nature, morality, and all other external concerns were irrelevant to the true artist.’ It was a revolutionary concept in its day, and nothing could have been further from Hunt’s (and the early Pre-Raphaelites) core beliefs and long-term aims. As Smith states: ‘The concept of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ was antithetical to the principles that lay behind early Pre-Raphaelite works in its prioritisation of visual and decorative qualities over moral and narrative considerations.’ (Reflections, Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites, p. 52). It is perhaps not surprising that this picture has no real parallel in Holman Hunt’s oeuvre. By the time it was exhibited, he had attempted to return to the Holy Land, although this ambition had been temporarily thwarted by Fanny’s death in Italy on 26th October 1866, following the birth of their son, Cecil Benoni (Hebrew for ‘child of sorrow’).

Aestheticism took many pictorial forms, but none was more pervasive in the early stages than a certain ‘Venetian’ idiom. This was represented by rather worldly, hedonistic images of beautiful women, usually seen half-length, which looked back to the prototypes established by Palma Vecchio and Titian, or, less often, by a Giorgionesque design (sometimes known at the time as a ‘Boccaccio composition’) of figures seated on the ground listening to music or someone reading from a book (as in the discarded book in Il Dolce Far Niente). Hunt’s predilection for rich materials and elaborate surface patterning sits well within this Venetian tradition and is captured beautifully in this painting displaying purely visual elements, supplanting any narrative purpose and creating pure sensual affect. They are significantly illustrated too in Hunt’s paintings, The Awakening Conscience (1853, Tate Britain) in which the model is Annie Miller and Portrait of Fanny Holman Hunt (1866-67, Toledo Museum of Art), which Hunt began in Florence during the late summer of 1866, where Fanny posed behind a chair to conceal her pregnancy. Hunt completed the painting from memory and photograph in London after Fanny’s death. To uphold his meticulously realistic style, he had Fanny’s paisley shawl, purple dress and brooch retrieved from Florence.

The circular mirror on the far wall looks back to the one that Hunt had introduced into his design of The Lady of Shalott conceived about 1850 and developed for one of the illustrations that he contributed to the famous Moxon edition of Tennyson’s poems. The idea seems to have been inspired originally by the comparable mirror in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage (1434, The National Gallery). In Reflections, Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites, Alison Smith points out that, ‘The seemingly magical properties’ of the ‘deforming characteristics of the convex mirror had been popular with artists since the fifteenth century, encouraging Van Eyck to capture subtleties of reflection, and later Parmigianino to explore the boundaries of truth and fiction in his celebrated Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ (c. 1524, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). (Alison Smith, Reflections, Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites, 2017, p. 43). Smith suggests that the, ‘strange hallucinatory effects’ of the round convex mirror came to be associated with the Aesthetic interior and its depiction in paintings complemented the, ‘appearance of small-scale circular mirrors in the homes of the most advanced taste-makers of the day.’ (Alison Smith, Ibid, p. 52). Rossetti (who had twenty-four mirrors in his Chelsea home, nine of which were convex) and Burne-Jones loved to introduce circular mirrors into their paintings.

The mirror was often used to illustrate the inner psychological world of the artist or subject. Holman Hunt’s painting The Awakening Conscience (1853, Tate Britain) was the first of the Pre-Raphaelite’s exhibited paintings to use a mirror to offer a new metaphysical understanding of the subject; in this case, symbolising truth, hope and the spiritual epiphany of the kept woman and her desire for redemption. In Il Dolce Far Niente, the convex mirror does not reflect the room in a realistic fashion. Rather, the reflection suggests a depth of space in the room which is lacking in the main part of the painting, where the figure of woman looms large, dominating the space. In the mirror, the artist illustrates the invisible (possibly internal world) of the woman and she is depicted lounging on the floor, propped up by cushions, in front of a warm glowing fire, perhaps suggesting a different moment in time. It is as if there is a painting within a painting, or a space within a space. According to Smith, ’Hunt was purportedly more concerned with material reality than Rossetti and his followers, his placement of the mirror and its illogical reflection suggest a shared concern to engage with his subject on a subjective, even fantastical level – a shift in emphasis that anticipates the inward-looking Symbolist art of the fin de siècle.’ (Alison Smith, Reflections, Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites, 2017, p. 54).