Robert Hunt

Robert Hunt (fl. 1809) was an English writer. His infamous reviews of the works of William Blake are amongst the earliest criticism of the poet and painter.

Robert was the brother of Leigh Hunt, the well-known writer, and John Hunt (1775–1848), who founded the Examiner; his writing appeared in this influential journal.

His work might have remained in obscurity, if not for a vitriolic attack on the works and character of Blake during 1808 and 1809. The second of these reviews was of Blake's exhibition at Golden Square in London, his illustrations to Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and its Descriptive Catalogue. Hunt's review of both these works was pungent, after the failure of the exhibition Blake's response was no less so,

'The manner in which my character has been blasted these thirty years, both as an artist and as a man, may be seen particularly in a Sunday paper called the Examiner, published in Beaufort's Buildings; the manner in which I have rooted out the nest of villains will be seen in a poem concerning my three years' Herculean labours at Felpham, which I shall soon publish.'—Blake, W., Ms. (the "Rossetti Manuscript")

Hunt's notice added emphasis to a selection of quotes from Blake's Descriptive Catalogue, as a preface "to amuse the reader, and satisfy him of the truth of the foregoing remarks." What follows is what Arthur Symons described as "among the infamies of journalism". It was here that the paper's wild and moralistic criticism, calling for censure of Blake's "libidinous" depictions and descriptions of his works as "absurdities".

Hunt's "extravagantly malicious attack" on these works was countered in Blake's notebooks, and, as some later critics contend, satirised in his poetry. Contemporary notices that followed echoed the sentiments expressed, but the partisan view of a coddled and talentless madman was submerged by biographical and critical notices that ranged from sympathetic to unconstrained adoration.