Summary
Painted in the 1840s, Primroses and Bird’s Nest is an exquisite example of the meticulously detailed still-life arrangements of natural forms which Hunt developed and refined from the 1830s on. These were regarded as virtually Hunt’s own invention, and their success earned him the nickname ‘Bird’s Nest’ Hunt.
Hunt’s early landscape work in oil was grounded in his extensive experience of outdoor sketching; he was a student of the watercolourist John Varley (1778–1842), whose dictum ‘Go to Nature for everything’, was adopted by Hunt as his own. Hunt himself stated the belief that in nature ‘you will find drawing, expression, colour, and light and shade, all of the most perfect kind’ (quoted in Jones, p.47). From the mid-1820s Hunt abandoned oils for watercolour; he was elected a member of the Old Water-Colour Society in 1826… (read more)
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