Year 1853 (MDCCCLIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian Calendar and a common year starting on Thursday of the 12-day slower Julian calendar.
William Holman Hunt OM (2 April 1827 – 7 September 1910) was an English painter, and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
William Holman Hunt changed his middle name from "Hobman" to Holman when he discovered that a clerk had misspelled the name after his baptism at the church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Ewell. After eventually entering the Royal Academy art schools, having initially been rejected, Hunt rebelled against the influence of its founder Sir Joshua Reynolds. He formed the Pre-Raphaelite movement in 1848, after meeting the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Along with John Everett Millais they sought to revitalise art by emphasising the detailed observation of the natural world in a spirit of quasi-religious devotion to truth. This religious approach was influenced by the spiritual qualities of medieval art, in opposition to the alleged rationalism of the Renaissance embodied by Raphael. He had many pupils including Robert Braithwaite Martineau.
Hunt married twice. After a failed engagement to his model Annie Miller, he married Fanny Waugh, who later modelled for the figure of Isabella. When she died in childbirth in Italy he sculpted her tomb at Fiesole, having it brought down to the English Cemetery, beside the tomb of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. His second wife, Edith, was Fanny's sister. At this time it was illegal in Britain to marry one's deceased wife's sister, so Hunt was forced to travel abroad to marry her. This led to a serious breach with other family members, notably his former Pre-Raphaelite colleague Thomas Woolner, who had once been in love with Fanny and had married Alice, the third sister of Fanny and Edith.
William Arthur Holman (4 August 1871 – 6 June 1934) was the second Australian Labor Party Premier of New South Wales, Australia. He later split with the party on the conscription issue in 1916 during World War I, and immediately became Premier of a conservative Nationalist Party Government.
Holman was born in St Pancras, London, England in 1871, the son of William Holman, an actor, his mother was also on the stage under the name of May Burney. He was educated at an Anglican school and was apprenticed as a cabinetmaker. He attended night classes and literary societies. There were bad times in the theatrical profession during the 1880s, and the Holmans were glad to obtain an engagement with Brough and Boucicault in Australia. The family migrated to Melbourne, Australia in October 1888. The burning of the Bijou theatre in Melbourne resulted in their move to Sydney.
As a cabinet maker in Sydney he was interested in the ideas of John Stuart Mill, William Morris, Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin, and became very active in the Australian labour movement. He joined the Single Tax League, the Australian Socialist League and the newly-formed Labor Electoral League, a forerunner to the Australian Labor Party (ALP). In the Australian Socialist League he mixed with anarchists and socialists and met future Prime Minister Billy Hughes, Creo Stanley, Ernie Lane, Henry Lawson and J.D.Fitzgerald. Holman and Hughes were associated with Arthur Desmond on the scandal sheet paper, The New Order.
Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein (Russian: Анто́н Григо́рьевич Рубинште́йн, tr. Anton Grigor'evič Rubinštejn) (November 28 [O.S. November 16] 1829 – November 20 [O.S. November 8] 1894) was a Russian pianist, composer and conductor who became a pivotal figure in Russian culture when he founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. This, together with the Moscow Conservatory founded by his brother Nikolai, were the first music schools of their type in Russia. This proved no less controversial than other aspects of Rubinstein's career, as Russian culture was deeply divided and the nation itself was going through an identity crisis that would last for the rest of the 19th century. Rubinstein drew a tremendous amount of criticism about the conservatory from nationalistically minded individuals such as critic Vladimir Stassov and members of the group of composers known collectively as The Five.
Bernhard Molique (Wilhelm Bernhard Molique; 7 October 1802 – 10 May 1869) was a German violinist and composer. He was born in Nuremberg and learned to play the violin at the University of Munich under Pietro Rovelli. In 1826 he became music-director at Stuttgart.
As a composer Molique was unapologetically self-taught. His music displays the influence of Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn and, especially, Louis Spohr. The then radical developments represented by Berlioz (who publicly praised his violin playing) and the New German school (Neudeutschen Schule) left Molique untouched, however.
His Cello Concerto was successfully played in Baden-Baden, by Léon Jacquard, conducted by Hector Berlioz, on August 27, 1860. He also wrote some charming songs. He died in Cannstatt in 1869. One of his pupils was the violinist Henry Blagrove.