Self-Portrait

This early self-portrait, dated 1845 when Hunt was eighteen, joins the Ashmolean self-portrait from 1841 as evidence of the young painter's sustained habit of self-examination. To paint oneself repeatedly across adolescence is to use self-portraiture as both a technical exercise and a mode of self-constitution — the act of seeing and recording one's own face a form of self-knowledge that anticipates the intense moral seriousness Hunt would bring to all his subsequent work. The Birmingham Museums Trust's collection of this work places it alongside many of Hunt's most important paintings, where it can be understood as part of the trajectory from a self-taught teenager to the founder of Britain's most significant nineteenth-century painting movement. By 1845, Hunt had not yet begun his training at the Royal Academy Schools, making this an entirely self-directed exercise.

Compared to the 1841 self-portrait, this canvas shows four years of development in Hunt's technical capacity. The modeling of the face is more assured, the relationship between light and shadow more consistently managed. The approach still reflects the academic conventions of the period rather than the white-ground Pre-Raphaelite technique Hunt would adopt three years later, but the observation of individual features has the precision that would characterize all his subsequent portraiture.