• Desperately Respectable
    13/08/2009

    The most notable painting in Torre Abbey's permanent collection is the desperately respectable 'The Children's Holiday' by Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt.  The BBC 2 programme 'Desperate Romantics' currently airing on Tuesday evenings, has vividly brought to life the three men most central to the Pre-Raphelite movement: John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.

    One of the most powerful paintings produced by the Pre-Raphaelites featured another work of Hunt's and the BBC2 programme about this painting portrayed Holman Hunt as a deeply religious man.  He asked Annie Miller, a prostitute, to sit for him.  It is her image that we see staring painfully into the distance in the astonishingly detailed piece called 'The Awakening Conscience'.  The painting tells the story of the 'fallen or kept woman'.  Holman Hunts shows her at the moment she realises that her life is a sham and that she must look to disentangle herself from the relationship.  There are many symbols of this, from the sheet music on the piano to her bare ring finger and the soiled and discarded glove at her feet. 
    The Awakening Conscience, Tate Collection

    Torre Abbey's Holman Hunt stands in sharp contrast to the earlier piece, but the two are inextricably linked. 'The Awakening Conscience' was made possible by Thomas Fairbairn, a wealthy industrialist who became Hunt's patron and, some years later, commissioned the artist to paint his family.  The result is 'The Children's Holiday' which depicts a perfect and morally reputable family at whose centre the sits the matriarch, Mrs Thomas Fairbairn. She appears as a mother at the centre of her universe, surrounded by her doting children, a sumptuous picnic laid out before her.   Yet perhaps even here we can detect a little disapproval?  Does she not seem a little too content, event smug?  Do come to Torre Abbey and see for yourself.


    'The Children's Holiday' was offered to Torre Abbey in 1932 by a descendant of the Fairbairn family and the council paid £30,000 for it.  The Abbey's archives show that it was duly delivered on the 26th June 1933 by the Great Western Railway and that the delivery cost was 2 shillings and 6d.

News