William Holman Hunt - Isabella and the Pot of Basil [1867]

William Holman Hunt - Isabella and the Pot of Basil [1867], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

William Holman Hunt (April 2, 1827 – September 7, 1910) was a British painter, and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Hunt's intended middle name was Hobman, which he disliked intensely. He chose to call himself Holman when he discovered that his middle name had been misspelled this way after a clerical error at his baptism at the church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Ewell. Though his surname is Hunt, his fame in later life led to the inclusion of his middle name as part of his surname, in the hyphenated form Holman-Hunt, by which his children were known.

Hunt married twice. After a failed engagement to his model Annie Miller, he married Fanny Waugh, who later modelled for the figure of Isabella. When she died in childbirth in Italy he sculpted her tomb up at Fiesole, having it brought down to the English Cemetery, beside the tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. His second wife, Edith, was Fanny's sister. At this time it was illegal in Britain to marry one's deceased wife's sister, so Hunt was forced to travel abroad to marry her. This led to a serious breach with other family members, notably his former Pre-Raphaelite colleague Thomas Woolner, who had married Fanny and Edith's third sister Alice.