Bird's Nest and Blossom,

1850-1860

Hunt’s still-life watercolors provide a bridge between the eighteenth-century school of British watercolorists like Cozzens and Cox and the mid-nineteenth-century Victorian Pre-Raphaelites, with their passion for highly finished detail. Using a technique of his own invention, Hunt would first prepare his drawings in the 1850s with textured strokes of white gouache thickened with gum arabic, over which he applied touches of pure, transparent watercolor to produce images of remarkable verisimilitude. Hunt’s sparkling watercolor still-lives were admired by the French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire when they were shown in the Paris Salon of 1855, and by the British artist and educator John Ruskin, who lavishly praised them in his influential book Elements of Drawing, published in 1857.