Frank Holl: a forgotten talent much admired by van Gogh

The Watts Gallery, just outside Guildford off the Hog’s Back, is a delightful place to visit at any season, with its permanent collection of work by G.F. Watts, whose studio it once was, and an ambitious programme of exhibitions on related subjects. But as autumn reaches over the hills a sense of the Victorian past may be even more closely felt and appreciated, and particularly a life of promise cut short, as was the case with Frank Holl (1845–88). Until this exhibition began to gather a fresh audience, few had heard of Holl or were able to summon an image by him to mind. This show brings together some 30 of his most famous works and offers us the chance to reassess an unfairly forgotten talent. Holl came from a family of engravers, and himself worked on The Graphic, a newly founded illustrated weekly newspaper. Among the contributors were Trollope and Thomas Hardy, as well as artists Frank Brangwyn and Luke Fildes. When he lived in England, Vincent van Gogh deeply admired Holl’s prints, which he saw in The Graphic, writing to his brother: ‘For me one of the highest and noblest expressions of art is always that of the English, for instance Millais and Herkomer and Frank Holl. What I mean in regard to the difference between the old masters and the modern ones is — perhaps the modern ones are deeper thinkers.’ It was Holl’s early subject pictures that van Gogh responded to: the social-realist work which can seem a trifle sentimental to modern eyes.

Look at ‘Faces in the Fire’ with its blatant symbolism of poverty: broken saucer, bare feet, empty birdcage. Other paintings resonate with such titles as ‘Hush!’ (the baby sleeps) and ‘Hushed’ (the baby is dead), or ‘Despair’ and ‘Hope’.