Museum of the Home collections

Paintings, Prints and Drawings

My "Macbeth", a group portrait, possibly of the artist with his wife and son, in a domestic interior. Oil on canvas in a gilded wood and composition frame, by Charles Hunt (1829-1900), signed and dated 1863.

My "Macbeth"

painting
oil painting

4/2012

Charles Hunt (artist)

1863-1864 (painted)

London (painted)

Victorian (1837-1901)

oil paint
canvas

painted

Painting, oil on canvas, glazed and framed in a gilded wood and plaster frame. The painting is signed and dated by the artist along the cross bar of the easel and at the bottom right hand corner of the painting within the image. There are a number of paper labels attached to the back of the painting and the frame.

In this painting a man, probably the artist, is shown proudly displaying one of his paintings, which has been placed on an easel in a comfortably furnished parlour, to a woman and boy, possibly his wife and son. Although the architecture of the interior is somewhat simplified, a number of furnishing details are included in the image. The fireplace and firetools are visible in the background. The window treatment, consisting of blinds, net curtains and a fringed pelmet can be seen reflected in the Rococo revival overmantel mirror. A selection of rustic (and humorous) genre and landscape paintings in gilt frames adorn the walls and the mantelpiece is ornamented with a glass lustre and a vase. The room is completed with a patterned carpet and several upholstered chairs, also in the Rococo revival style.

chair
fireplace
mirror
carpet
painting
curtain
blind
lustre
vase

height: 51cm
width: 66cm
Height: 66.7cm
Width: 81.1cm

images of living rooms
floor treatments
living room furniture
seating
ornaments
pictures
window treatments
fireplaces

Label text for the digital interactive located in the Reading Room (September 2015- June 2017):

‘My “Macbeth”’
By Charles Hunt
Oil on canvas, dated 1863

In this self-portrait, the artist depicts himself showing one of his most successful paintings to two visitors. The work on display shows a group of children performing the ‘banquet scene’ from Shakespeare’s play ‘Macbeth’, in which the ghost of the murdered Banquo appears for the first time.

The copy of the Art Journal conspicuously placed on the chair in the foreground may be a reference to a favourable review of that painting.

The setting is a fairly typical middle-class domestic interior of the period, but the paintings of a girl with a cabbage and a boy holding a pig which flank the fireplace have been included for comic effect.

Label text for the Art Fund, February 2012:
Group portrait, possibly the artist with his family, in a domestic interior, oil on canvas by Charles Hunt, signed and dated 1863.

The painting is out of copyright (the artist died in 1900).