There are more dramatic images I could have chosen to represent Holman-Hunt, The Scapegoat, for example or The Hireling Shepherd, but this painting, Isabella and the Pot of Basil , has a personal connection for me because I’ve been visiting the original in the Delaware Art Museum since I was an adolescent.

The painting was personal for Holman-Hunt in a very different way. It was based on portraits of his first wife and painted shortly after her death. The rather macabre story it depicts is from a Renaissance poem in which Isabella discovers the body of Lorenzo, who her brothers have murdered because they want her to marry another. She severs his head and buries it in a pot of basil which she waters with her tears. Holman-Hunt also painted a larger version of the same composition, which is in the Laing Gallery in Newcastle, England.

The original painting is small (15×23″, 38x58cm) and has a gem-like quality when standing in front of it. It is rich with the extraordinary detail and luminescent color that make the Pre-Raphaelite works so appealing to many (except, of course, to art critics, who seem immune to visual pleasure). You can literally spend hours working your eye through Holman-Hunt’s paintings, luxuriating in the visual feast of his attention to the texture and color of physical objects.

The composition of this work seems oddly off-kilter, but Holman-Hunt was such a masterful painter that I have to assume that is intentional. I find myself leaning into the pot of Basil with isabella and perhaps feeling additionally unsettled as if sharing her disorienting grief.

Even though Holman-Hunt professed social and religious views that valued purity and piety and often portrayed religious subjects, his paintings seem to revel in the sensuality of the physical world; you want to run your hand across the polished wood, feel the embroidered fabrics with your fingers, smell the plants and be dazzled by the light that bathes objects in glowing warmth.

Holman-Hunt, along with Dante Gabriel Rosetti and John Everett Millais, who he met while they were students at the Royal Academy, was a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of English painters and writers who rejected the idealized academic painting of the day, as exemplified by Sir Joshua Reynolds, then head of the Royal Academy, and embraced a return to the rich color and detail of the early Renaissance (before Raphael and his contemporaries started their own kind of idealized painting).

They desired to be faithful to nature in their paintings an also infused them with romanticism, pulling their subject matter from Keats, Shakespeare and classical literature. They were aided by critic John Ruskin, one of the few art critics who actually seems to have made a contribution to the history of art, if only because he defended the Pre-Raphaelites against the harsh treatment they received from other critics (a practice that still seems necessary today.)

There is a good selection of Holman-Hunt’s paintings on the Art Renewal Center and the ARTchive (ad warning).

For years, The Sleeping Gypsy (above), a painting by French artist Henri Rousseau, was one of the most widely reproduced images in the world. (It may still be, I don’t know.) When I was in college I marveled at the number of apartment and dorm room walls it appeared on. My own apartment at the time had a copy of Rousseau’s Carnival Night (below, left) on a prominent wall and I spent a fair bit of time in front of the original in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A major exhibition of Rousseau’s jungle-themed paintings just closed a the Tate Gallery in London and his work is on prominent display in major museums around the world. Not bad for a self-taught “naive” artist who didn’t start painting seriously until he was 40.

Rousseau desparately wanted to paint like Bougereau or Gérôme, mainstream Academic Salon painters of his day. Fortunately for us, his own individualistic vision was stronger than that desire, and seemingly impervious to the influence of the impressionist style blooming around him, even though he associated with artists in that circle.

Loosely classed as a “Post-Impressionist”, Rousseau stands unique, almost outside the flow of art history. Yes, you can find influences if you look hard enough (Gauguin, for one), but his style doesn’t really “fit” anywhere. The Surrealists adopted him as a precursor to Surrealism, admiring the dream-like quality of his images and the vertiginous lack of formal perspective (which he never mastered, perhaps a moot point since it was being intentionally abandoned by modernist painters at the time). He got the attention of many of the avant-garde artists and writers of the day, including Degas, Renoir, Gauguin and Aplloinaire. Many of them joined in a banquet organized by Picasso in Rousseau’s honor two years before his death.

Critics ridiculed Rousseau as not a serious artist (as critics will, being such a broad-minded, egalitarian and generous group as a whole), and called him Le Douanier, “the customs inspector”, after his day-job of many years. (Of course these same people would probably have called Einstein “the patent clerk”.) Rousseau was from a family of modest means and couldn’t afford to go to art school. Admittedly, he was eccentric; he considered himself one of the greatest artists of the age, seemed unable to distinguish sarcastic remarks from sincere compliments and sometimes bragged of accomplishments that were untrue.

His paintings, though, speak undeniably of their own power. His fantastic images of intense jungles and wild beasts (based on books and visits to the botanical gardens, he never left France) resonate with us on some instinctual level. He not only developed his own artistic style, but his own unconventional methods of painting, applying the colors one at a time, painting in layers of content (sky first, then other background elements, finishing with foreground subjects) and working the canvas methodically from the top down.

Here is a good bio on the Artelino Art Auction site. Here is a nice site devoted to Rousseau and his work, but the color of the reproductions is off. There are Rousseau links on the Artcyclopedia site

The sites I link to below are image collections on the WebMuseum and the ARTchive (pop-up and ad warning for the latter).