Artists – H

The daughter of an army officer, Hamnett was born in Wales and had a peripatetic childhood, showing early talent for drawing and painting. In 1911 she set up a studio in Grafton Street in Fitzrovia. Throughout her early career she worked at the Omega Workshops and was well known on the London art scene. Hamnett moved to Paris in 1913 and lived in Montparnasse. She attended Marie Wassilieff's academy where she had lessons with Fernand Leger, worked as an artist’s model and met Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and Gertrude Stein.She was at the heart of the Anglo-French exchange of artistic ideas at this period and came and went between Paris and London. Hamnett was back in France in 1920 enjoying the Bohemian life of the French capital with other artists and seeking out the avant-garde.One of Hamnett’s first solo exhibitions was held at the Eldar Gallery, London in 1918 and consisted mainly of portraits of figures she had met in Paris.Hamnett, dubbed the ‘Queen of Bohemia’ is now recognised as a leading proponent of British Modernism and a retrospective of her work, including many drawings, was held at Charleston in 2021.The grandmother of the previous owner and her husband used to frequent the Fitzroy Tavern and drink with the artists and intellectuals who were regulars there.

The artist was a landscape painter of the Barbizon school. After following his family’s wish for him to go into business he started to study art in his late twenties. Following a few years in Italy he returned to France and fell in with Corot and the other artists of the Barbizon school. He and Corot travelled to Italy together in 1860.He exhibited regularly at the Salon from 1861. His work can be found in many of the world’s major museums.

Born in London in 1837, as Katherine Carr, Kate Gardiner Hastings received her artistic education at the Slade School in London. From 1871 - 1876 she studied with John Poynter and upon the completion of her studies, in 1877, she married Alfred Gardiner Hastings. For the next few years she exhibited regularly showing her work at the Dudley Gallery and the Walker Gallery.The artist drew a series of portraits of Terry’s family circa 1890 which are now part of the National Trust Collection and held at Terry's former home, Smallhythe Place in Kent (NT/SMA/D/20, 21, 22, and 23). These portray Benjamin and Sarah Terry, (the actress’s mother and father) and her children Edith, the theatre director and activist and Edward Gordon Craig, the theatre designer. The pastel of Sarah Terry (1817-1892) was exhibited at the Summer Exhibition of 1890 at New Gallery, London.Another red chalk portrait of the actress as Ophelia in Hamlet c. 1878 by the artist is in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum (S.1484-2014).

Matilda Hayes was the daughter of William Hayes (1734-1802), the British illustrator best known for A Natural History of British Birds (1775) and Rare and Curious Birds Accurately Drawn and Colored from Their Specimens in the Menagerie at Osterly Park (1794-99). One of Hayes’ seven children she worked with her father and drew bird illustrations.A self-taught artist, Hayes worked from live specimens he kept in captivity, as well as birds from the collection of one of his patrons, the Duchess of Portland. Like Audubon, Hayes depicted birds at life size whenever possible. He presumably taught his wife Anne and children including Charles, William, Annette, Emily, Maria and Matilda with whom he worked at printing, colouring and assembling volumes, and some of his bird illustrations were drawn by other members of his large family.In the mid-1780s, Hayes moved to Southall, near Osterley Park, and the estate’s owners, Robert and Sarah Child, of the banking family, who collected exotic birds, became his patrons. Horace Walpole described ‘a menagerie full of birds that comes from a thousand islands which Mr. Banks has not yet discovered’ (Walpole to Lady Ossory 21 June, 1773. (Lewis, ed. Walpole’s Correspondence, 1937), 126).Hayes and his family also painted portraits of birds belonging to John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich.The Red-bellied Macaw is a small, green macaw closely associated with the Mauritia palm tree of northern South America. It feeds on the palm's fruits, and nests in a hole in a dead palm surrounded by water.

Helleu studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1876 in the atelier of Jean-Léon Gerome. In Paris, his circle of intimate friends included fellow artists Giovanni Boldini, Alfred Stevens, Edgar Degas, Rodin, Claude Monet and notably the Americans Whistler and Sargent, with whom he briefly shared a studio.Helleu exhibited several large pastel portraits to great acclaim at the Salons of 1885 and 1886, including one of Alice Louis-Guérin, to whom he became engaged in 1885. He and Alice married in 1886 at the church of Saint-Pierre in Neuilly. Although friendly with many of the Impressionist painters and invited by Degas to participate in the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition of 1886, Helleu declined to do so. He exhibited six pastels at the Salon des Pastellistes at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1887, including two further portraits of Alice. At this time he first met Comte Robert de Montesquieu, who was to become his leading patron and who, in 1913, published the first important monograph on the artist.In 1889 Paul and Alice Helleu spent some time with Sargent at Fladbury in England, and he made several studies of Alice and an oil of Paul painting her (Brooklyn Museum, New York). The 1890s were a successful decade for Helleu, who moved comfortably in society in both France and England. He obtained numerous lucrative portrait commissions and enjoyed considerable financial success. Helleu also met and enjoyed a long friendship with Marcel Proust, who is thought to have based the character of the painter Elstir in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu on him.Encouraged by Sargent, Helleu began travelling to America in 1902, where his reputation had preceded him, and he enjoyed further success drawing elegant Society women. His subjects included the Comtesse Greffulhe, Queen Alexandra and Consuelo Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough. These works were greatly admired by his contemporaries. His preferred subject remained Alice, whom he drew many times.The writer Edmond de Goncourt wrote of Alice Helleu that [s]he was incapable of making a movement that was not graceful and elegant, and ten times a day he [Paul-César Helleu] tried to capture those movements with a quick drypoint sketch.In 1931, four years after Helleu’s death, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris. Today his work can be found in many museum collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Hoare, a portraitist in oil and pastel settled in London in the 1720s and was apprenticed to the Flemish painter Giseppe Grisoni. In 1728 he returned to Italy and took Hoare with him. Hoare spent a decade in Italy, studying the Old Masters, meeting British ‘Grand Tourists’, many of whom became future patrons, and perfecting his technique in chalk and pastel.On his return to England he settled in fashionable Bath around 1738, where he remained until his death. He was a founder member of the Royal Academy. This portrait is a charming example of the intimate style Hoare adopted later in his career when painting his family and friends, with rapid, loose strokes which suggest form. It would have been intended as a private image of which very few were worked up into oil paintings.

James Holland OWS was born in Burslem, Staffordshire, where his father and other members of his family (including his brother Thomas, also an artist) were employed at the pottery works of William Davenport in Longport. James was employed there from the age of twelve, for seven years, painting flowers on pottery and porcelain.In 1819, Holland came to London where he continued to work as a pottery painter, but also gave lessons in drawing landscapes, architecture, and marine subjects. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1824, became an associate exhibitor of The Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1835 and joined the Society of British Artists in 1843. In 1858 he was elected a full member of the Old Water Colour Society.Holland travelled extensively on the Continent between the 1830s and the 1850s, and he became known for his topographical works which were reproduced in the illustrated travel annuals of the day. He visited Venice, Milan, Geneva, and Paris, Portugal, Normandy and made tours of North Wales in 1850 and 1855.He exhibited prolifically during his lifetime and showed thirty-two pictures at the Royal Academy, ninety-one at the British Institution, and 108 at the Society of British Artists.

The artist was self-taught and specialised in drawings of animals and field sports. He also worked as an illustrator, print maker and in oils. From a wealthy Quaker Nottinghamshire family and a keen sportsman, Howitt took up art professionally when he encountered financial difficulties and became a drawing master in Ealing. He exhibited at the Incorporated Society of Artists and Royal Academy and illustrated many sporting and zoological books.He married Thomas Rowlandson's sister Elizabeth in 1779 and was part of Rowlandson's circle together with George Morland, Henry Wigstead and John Raphael Smith. His work was influenced by that of Rowlandson. He lived in London for most of his life. His work can be found in most major drawings collections.Additional InformationGovernment Art CollectionYale Center for British ArtTate

William Hunt, the son of a London manufacturer, was born with a deformation of his legs which restricted his movement and seems to have had a form of dwarfism. According to his early biographer, F. G. Stephens, Hunt was: ‘was a little less than… five foot. He was broad as well as round shouldered and his head was large beyond proportion to the rest of his figure which the torso was that of a larger man. His large and long frock coats and loose trousers although favourable to him on other accounts, did not add to his outward graces.’ Stephens adds that Hunt’s personal disabilities: ‘frequently made him reserved and not very easily accessible to strangers.’ Hunt studied with John Varley, from 1804-11, at the Royal Academy Schools and attended Dr Thomas Monro’s ‘Academy’.Hunt worked mainly in the studio and specialised in genre portraits, mainly of figures in domestic settings, and carefully drawn small-scale still lifes and pioneered new techniques of watercolour, using stipple techniques in subtle colour combinations and achieving a brightness of colour by overlaying washes over white gouache. He earned the soubriquet ‘Bird’s Nest Hunt’ and his work was highly prized. John Ruskin admired his work and took lessons from him in 1854 and 1861.He exhibited widely during his lifetime and his work can be found in all major drawings collections.Additional InformationTateArt UKCourtauld

Cecil Arthur Hunt (1873 - 1965) was born in Devon and educated at Winchester and Trinity, Cambridge. He was called to the Bar in 1899 and practiced as a barrister until 1925, when he was elected to full membership of the Royal Society of Painters in Water -Colours, having hitherto painted extensively, but as a hobby. Hunt was initially known as a painter of mountains, particularly the Alps and the Dolomites, and he first exhibited at the Alpine Club Galleries in 1900. He soon became recognised, however, for his skill in depicting a wider range of topographies, including the West Country, the West Coast of Scotland, the Rhône Valley and Italy. Hunt and his wife, Phyllis, also made many trips to Sicily, where they stayed at the Casa Cuseni in Taormina, which belonged to his friend, Robert Kitson (1873 – 1947), the painter and critic, who he first met at Cambridge. Casa Cuseni is now a museum and is, perhaps, best known for its dining room designed by Sir Frank Brangwyn (1867 – 1956). Hunt exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists and the Royal Society of Painters in Water - Colours. He also held numerous solo shows at the Fine Art Society, Colnaghi and other London galleries. Hunt’s work can be seen in many public collections, including the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.Additional InformationVictoria & Albert MuseumYale Center for British ArtArt UK