Hunt made several studies of black sitters, including a beautifully observed drawing of a young girl in pencil on buff paper now in the Courtauld Institute, London, a boy posing as a boxer in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (formerly with Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd), and a watercolour of young boy with a slate at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Hunt’s more finished studies of black children frequently appealed to the sentimentalised nineteenth-century view of childhood, albeit, a view overlaid with racial prejudice.[1] By contrast, this naturalistic study of a young boy is more ambiguous. British artists were increasingly interested in Black subjects during the 1830s, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833 and the abolition movement gripped fashionable London.

Hunt’s carefully observed watercolour has a candour and immediacy which suggests it is a study taken from life. Hunt’s technique owes much to his carefully executed still lives, particularly the use of dots of watercolour to build up the exquisitely modelled face. This may point to an aspect of Hunt’s art that has not received sufficient attention. Hunt himself almost certainly suffered from some form of physical deformity, 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.’[2] Stephens adds that Hunt’s personal disabilities: ‘frequently made him reserved and not very easily accessible to strangers.’ This reserve developed into a pathological dislike of his appearance, the painter G. P. Boyce noted in his diary that: ‘W. H. Hunt had a morbid conviction of his own ugliness and desired that all record of him to the present in the way of portraits or letters should be destroyed.’[3] There is evidence that Hunt’s physical deformity made him a marginalised figure in nineteenth-century London and someone who had an inherent sympathy for other marginalised characters.

According to several early biographers Hunt was familiar and friendly with members of Victorian London’s black community. In her memoirs Ann Mary Wood offers an account of Hunt’s character and habits:

‘a Quilp like dwarf but…[he] possessed the tenderest heart and the most sympathetic and delicate nerves. Like Paul Dombey he was addicted to low company, and street conjurors, acrobats and nigger minstrels were always welcome at the tea table of his humble lodging, and a certain ‘Bones’ in the latter troop was his especial friend.’ 

Bones was a generic character from minstrel shows, a reference to the instrument he would have played: bone castanets. But this reference suggests that Hunt was intimately acquainted with black performers. This is an area that deserves further investigation, given the small, but powerful group of studies Hunt made of black sitters. This immensely appealing work, preserved in excellent condition points a lost world of black culture in Victorian London.