Life and Work
Born Henry William Lowe Hurst in London in 1865, he was the son of Henry Hurst, a well-known African traveller and publisher. He was educated at St. Paul's School in London and soon after started recording the political instability of Ireland through drawings and illustrations. He travelled to the United States of America where he found work illustrating newspapers in New York and Philadelphia. Hal returned to Europe studying art at the Royal Academy Schools and the Académie Julian in Paris. He exhibited extensively at all the principal London galleries and was elected member of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1896, Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1898, and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1900. He was a founder member of the Royal Miniature Society from its inception in 1896 and elected Vice President, a position he held until stepping down in 1913 - he was given the distinction of Honorary member status the following year.
Hal shared a studio at 23a South Audley Street, Mayfair, London with Alyn Williams founder of the Royal Miniature Society. An motivated, prolific and respected artist, Hal illustrated in excess of 20 published books including Mark Twain's The American Claimant. In addition, his illustrations were published in Punch, Harper's Weekly, Vanity Fair, The Idler and the Illustrated London News, amongst others.
He married and had one son and two daughters with whom he lived at 9 Colville Mansions, Bayswater. He was the friend and neighbour of Douglas Sladen, the well-known author and travel writer, who also owned many of Hurst's paintings. Sladen described Hurst as being 'a very clever painter' and having a 'beautiful young wife.'
The National Art Library, London holds letters written by Hurst to Sir Isidore Spielmann and Reginald S. Hunt. Hal Hurst died in 1938.
Read more about this topic: Hal Hurst
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or work:
“There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)