ABSTRACT
Holman Hunt's attitude towards the English masters cannot be defined by any words but his own: Those English artists who, since the commencement of their opportunities, have won honour for our nation, have firmly dared to have break loose at some one point from the trammels of traditional authority. What gave the charm to Wilson's works was his departure from the examples of the classical painters whose general manner he affected. Wilkie, in his Blindman's Buff, found no type of its sweet humour and grace in the Dutch masters; and Turner's excellence had no antecedent type of its enchantment in the Claude or any other builder-up of pictorial scenery. When Holman Hunt was instructing Rossetti and later, he was disconcerted by the younger man's independence of new life and joy in Nature, and complained that Dantesque shapes of imagery had become Rossetti's alphabet of art.
