26 A MARINE EFFECT 1838

This watercolor from 1838 was one of William Henry Hunt's more ambitious figure paintings. He almost always painted single figures and only did compositions with two or three figures about ten or fifteen times. While very few of the many pencil sketches Hunt seems to have drawn to explore possibilities for new works actually relate to finished paintings [or can be matched up with watercolors which can still be traced], there are actually three studies for this watercolor on a single sheet of Hunt's doodles which I came across and purchased a few years ago.