HISTORY ILLUMINATED: WILLIAM HOLMAN HUNT'S LONDON BRIDGE

• Published in: Art history 2006-11, Vol.29 (5), p.827-859
• Main Author: MARSHALL, NANCY ROSE
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Art criticism; Art history; Hunt, William Holman (1827-1910); Lighting; Social history; Visual artists
• ISSN: 0141-6790; 1467-8365
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2006.00525.x

Grappling with the complex problem of how to represent history through the experience of ordinary people, William Holman Hunt's London Bridge of 1864 combined a modern urban crowd scene, a careful choice of depicted location, and an unusual deployment of light effects to create a painting about Victorian perceptions of time itself. By portraying a night‐time scene lit by the gas illuminations on the bridge in honour of the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales, Hunt drew on the traditional aesthetic of the sublime to create a spectacle of an historic event – a royal marriage – that inspired both wonder and fear. Juxtaposing the flame‐lit city with the moonlit Thames at the charged site of London Bridge allowed the artist to set in play the common Victorian framework one might term the ‘moralizing sublime’. This pervasive mode of thought involved reading the mighty strivings of man and the modern industrial city as puny, transitory glimmers in comparison with the infinite onward rush of time; paradoxically, it also permitted the wilful overlooking of any negative yet ephemeral consequences of modernity. These ideas were underscored by the original exhibition of London Bridge with another work by Hunt in which light plays a key role in producing meaning: The Afterglow in Egypt.