The Father's Leave-taking

In this print, Hunt depicts his second wife Edith embracing his daughter Gladys in a composition that references Italian Renaissance Madonna and Child images, and incorporates monumental classical architecture into the domestic interior. After losing his first wife, in 1866, after only one year of marriage, Hunt was acutely attuned to the unstable nature of life. The static stylization of the figures and the deeply etched contours of the mother and child’s drapery recall ancient Greek marble steles that commemorated a deceased individual, often shown with other family members. Through his quotation of these established pictorial traditions, Hunt imbues this quotidian episode of a father departing with a deeply symbolic and mournful tone.