Thomas Hunt ARSA 1854-1929

On the 13th March 1929, Tom Hunt died in Glasgow, which had long been his home. A Yorkshireman, born at Skipton in Craven in 1853, he was educated in Leeds, but coming to Scotland in 1878, he never returned to the South, nor in his art was there anything which suggested English influence.

At the Glasgow School of Art he worked for a time, and he also studied under R. Collin in Paris, but Hunt’s interests were mainly in the open air and the Highlands of Scotland, where he painted many pictures with cattle and sheep in the moors and hills he loved so well.

From time to time, however, he, as has been said, ‘surprised the public and even his friends by breaking away from his usual method and painting something seen from a window in the city, a view of roofs or of buildings under repair. And in these unexpected excursions he revealed an ability to handle transparent luminous colour with an essential rightness that placed him in the first rank.”

A work in this category gained Hunt a medal at the Paris Salon in 1921, and pictures of his were acquired by a number of public galleries, including that of Glasgow. He was elected an Associate of the Academy in 1925, and had been a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Water Colours since 1885, serving a term as Vice-President.

Tom Hunt was a personage, full of character, well read, an accomplished linguist, a good singer, a good talker, and a good companion at all times. In the Glasgow Art Club, of which he was President for two years, no one was better known or beloved.

RSA Obituary by G. Washington Browne & James Paterson.  Transcribed from the 1929 RSA Annual Report