William Henry Hunt began life as a protégé of Dr Thomas Monro and a💝 pupil of John Varley. He built a career that not only earned him financial security, but the respect of his fellow artists and much high praise from London’s fiercest art critics.

John Ruskin hung Hunt’s work (alongside🐲 his favorite Turners) in his bedroom and he was to describe him as one of the leading exponents of English naturalism.

This sensitive and technically highly accomplished watercolor is one of several that Hunt devoted to Black subjects. Created with a careful b🗹uild-up of layers of color – a method that would become familiar to the French impressionists – Hunt captures the flic♒kering candle-light and its effects on the surrounding surfaces with seeming ease.

Another version of this composition by Hunt, 𝕴with small compꦅositional differences, exists in an American private collection. That work is signed and dated 1835 and is inscribed on a former backboard ‘Light and Shade’. For this reason that title has also been given to the present work.