Item #4103 Hints for Pupils in Drawing and Painting. With Illustrations from Charcoal Drawings by William M. Hunt. Helen M. . Knowlton, by William M. Hunt, 1832–1918.
Hints for Pupils in Drawing and Painting. With Illustrations from Charcoal Drawings by William M. Hunt.
Hints for Pupils in Drawing and Painting. With Illustrations from Charcoal Drawings by William M. Hunt.
Hints for Pupils in Drawing and Painting. With Illustrations from Charcoal Drawings by William M. Hunt.

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Hints for Pupils in Drawing and Painting. With Illustrations from Charcoal Drawings by William M. Hunt.

Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company; Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1879. 12mo, gray cloth over boards, author, title and paint-brush design in black on upper cover. [5], 32 pp., 20 photolithographic [?] plates, including frontis., printed in brown, with tissue guards. A label for “Fresh Cream from Champernoun Farm, John Thaxter, Proprietor” is laid into the volume. John Thaxter, a gentleman farmer, was the son of Celia and Levi Thaxter.

An extraordinarily poignant association copy of this art instruction manual illustrated by William Morris Hunt, inscribed by Hunt to Celia Thaxter, just a month before she discovered his body in a shallow reservoir on Appledore Island after he had gone missing, with six of the plates initialed by Hunt as well. Inscribed in ink “Celia Thaxter, from Wm. M. Hunt, Aug 1879.”

Artist William Morris Hunt (1824-1879), a friend of Celia Thaxter and a regular visitor at her famed Isle of Shoals retreat for artists and writers, arrived there in July of 1879 in a state of nervous exhaustion, feeling that his work had come to an end. Writing to Annie Fields on 19 July, Thaxter noted “Just think of our having William Hunt here, shuddered back from the dreadful verge, so attenuated, so pathetic. He and his sister, his brother, and his man Carter are all housed beneath this cottage roof; and I hope and trust that the air is going to do everything for him.” Thaxter described the final weeks Hunt spent on the Island as pleasant and seemingly enjoyable and salubrious, although she clearly remained concerned about his depressed state. On Monday 8 September, however, tragedy struck:

He had not seemed more depressed than usual that morning. He sat with us by the fire for a while after breakfast. It had been raining. Then he went out, and we never saw him again. It was an hour or two before we were really aroused to alarm about him; for each one thought him in this or that place where he was accustomed to be, and no anxiety entered our hearts, for of such a catastrophe we could not dream…At the top of the ledge behind the cottage at Appledore is a tiny basin hollowed out of the rock to catch the rains, a shallow reservoir filled with water…It is a lovely place, this little sheet of tranquil water lying out on the top of the rocks, open to the sky and reflecting its every tint and change as perfectly as the great ocean beyond it…Here on that Monday morning, when all our little world was seeking him, I found all that was left of our beautiful friend, floating upon his face, while the wind fluttered a fold of his long coat which lay on the water dark in the still and sunny glitter of the surface elsewhere unbroken. In a moment help was on the spot, and unavailing efforts to resuscitate him were made, but life had been gone for some hours.

“I found him,” she wrote to a close friend. “It was reserved for me, who loved him truly, that bitterness.” The exact cause of Hunt’s death remains unclear. While many have considered it suicide, Hunt was also suffering from vertigo which may well have led to accidental drowning.

Originally a student of Hunt’s, the author of this volume, Helen Knowlton, encouraged other women to take his experimental art classes, became a teacher and artist herself, and authored a biography of Hunt. Knowlton dedicated this manual to Hunt, “from whose teaching much of the material for these pages” was obtained. A dedicated and inspiring art instructor, Hunt was nevertheless harshly criticized for teaching women, as it was viewed by some as a waste of his time.

An unusually poignant association book, inscribed and initialed by Hunt for his dear host and friend Celia Thaxter during his final stay on Appledore Island, just prior to his sad demise.

REFERENCES: The Letters of Celia Thaxter (Boston, 1897), pp. 93-94; Knowlton, Helen M. Art Life of William Morris Hunt (Boston, 1899), pp. 86-88.

CONDITION: Good, extremities rubbed with slight loss at head and foot of spine, light discoloration at edges of covers, spine sunned, 1 cm. ink stain on left edge of lower cover, tissue guards foxed.

Item #4103

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