In 1861 the publishers Hurst and Blackett, of 13 Great Marlborough Street, issued a 5s. volume in their standard Library series, entitled Studies from Life. It comprised short stories written by Dinah Mulock, who was usually styled in the nineteenth century “the author of John Halifax, Gentleman” (her most celebrated novel, which had appeared in 1857). Among these stories was Lost, which is the source of Holman Hunt's watercolour The Lost Child. According to the artist’s memoirs, he first met Dinah Mulock in about 1848, through her artist brother Tom. (William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1905, volume I, page 105) In November 1861 he agreed to illustrate Miss Mulock’s poem Go and Come for publication in Good Words for 1862 (George Dalziel, The Brothers Dalziel: A record of Fifty Years Work: 1840-1890, 1901, page 162. The engraving is illustrated in William Holman Hunt, exhibition catalogue, Walker Art Gallery 1969, plate 67). Hurst and Blackett had commissioned frontispieces from Millais in 1861 for works by Dinah Mulock in their Standard Library series (an edition of John Halifax, Gentleman and Nothing New) (See Malcolm John Warner, The Professional Career of John Everett Millais to 1863, with a Catalogue of Works to the same date, Courtauld Institute of Art PhD thesis, 1985, numbers E104-5, page 536. Warner lists, as a ‘version’ of the frontispiece Jean Dowgals to Nothing New, a watercolour measuring 5 x 3 inches. However, according to Charles Newton of the Department of Prints, Drawings and Paintings, Victoria & Albert Museum, Victorian steel engravers often worked from highly-detailed watercolours, and approached Hunt either this year or early in 1862 to illustrate the second edition of Studies from Life). His frontispiece appeared in late April 1862 (See advertisement in the Athenaeum, 26 April 1862, page 552), having been engraved in steel by Joseph Brown (For the portrait engraver Joseph Brown, see Rodney Engen, Dictionary of Victorian Engravers, Print Publishers and their Works, Cambridge and Teaneck, New Jersey 1979, page 36). Both in size and detail the engraving is virtually identical with the watercolour The Lost Child, which would have been executed as the preparatory drawing.(The engraving measures 5 5/16 x 3 5/16 inches, 13.4 x 8.5 centimetres). Hunt may have been alluding to it in March 1862, when he wrote to Alexander MacMillan: I have a great deal of evening work in arrears at present. Hunt’s image carefully encapsulates Dinah Mulock’s tale. For example, the packets on the floor in the right foreground refer to the beginning of the story, which reveals that advertisements in The Times often included references to missing persons, and those who have left their homes. Poignantly, the thickness of the packets, tied up with string, suggest the fruitlessness of the mother’s repeated attempts to trace her child. To quote Miss Mulock: what a number of people there must be in the world who are, not figuratively or poetically, but literally, “lost”; who by some means or other, accident, intention, carelessness, misfortune, or crime, have slipped out of the home circle, or the wider round of friendship or acquaintanceship, and never reappeared more … whose very memory is almost forgotten, and against whose name and date of birth in the Family Bible - if they ever had a family and a Bible - stands neither the brief momentous annotation “Married”, &c., nor the still briefer, and often much safer and happier inscription, “Died”; - nothing save the ominous, pathetic blank, which only the unveiled secrets of the Last Day will ever fill up. Hunt has included the family Bible, with the names of children inscribed against the title-page. The grief-stricken mother points to a line recording the birth of the infant in 1811, but there is no further information. On the chair at the left is the framed likeness of her as a young woman, together with one of her letters; the sampler on the wall was probably worked by her as a child. The meticulous handling of the watercolour, and the detailed depiction of a woman in a contemporary interior, can be compared to Hunt’s small oil painting Morning Prayer, 1865-6 (private collection, England). The subject of the later work is a girl at risk of becoming one of the ‘lost’ described in Miss Mulock’s tale.
George Frederick Smith, Cromwell Lodge, Putney Hill, London SW, in 1896; sold by his executrix at: Christie's, 16 April 1910, (lot 56); sold to: Charles Beilby, Baron Stuart of Wortley, PC, KC, MP, £57.15s.; by descent to his daughter: Clare Euphemia Stuart-Wortley 1917; by descent to her nephew: RA Cecil Esq., 1945; by descent to his niece to 1999
London, Corporation of London Art Gallery, Loan Collection of Watercolour Drawings, Guildhall, 1896, number 111 Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, William Holman Hunt, 1969, number 207
Judith Bronkhurst, William Holman Hunt, A Catalogue Raisonné, Volume II, number D216, illustrated page 115, Yale University Press New Haven and London, 2006