Arthur Hughes
1832-1915
Arthur Hughes was an English painter and illustrator associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was encouraged for his work by Millais and also by Rossetti.
Hughes was born in London. Hughes showed early artistic promise and enrolled in the Royal Academy Antique School in 1847. Hughes was inspired directly by The Germ, the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite magazine. He attended PRB meetings, in rather a junior hero-worshipping manner.
His best-known paintings are April Love and The Long Engagement, both of which depict troubled couples contemplating the transience of love and beauty. They are imitations of John Everett Millais's earlier "couple" paintings but place far greater emphasis on the pathos of human inability to maintain the freshness of youthful feeling in comparison to the regenerative power of nature.
Like Millais, Hughes also painted an Ophelia and illustrated Keats's poem The Eve of St. Agnes. Hughes's version of the latter is in the form of a secular triptych, a technique he repeated for scenes from Shakespeare's As You Like It. His works are noted for their magical, glowing coloring and delicate draughtsmanship.
Hughes main traits as an individual were his modesty and self-effacement. He was having a number of ill-merited rejections at the Royal Academy. He was never even elected an Associate.
Hughes married, in 1855 Tryphena Foord, and lived with her long and happy life. Hughes had the desire for a stable, happy family life and he was prepared to compromise artistic ambitions for this. Many of his pictures were of ordinary scenes of life. They were painted with great delicacy, feeling, were often in greens and mauves. Like the great orchestral composers, the warm sympathetic character of the man shines through in his work. Hughes was in close contact to the writer George MacDonald and illustrated some of his books.
Hughes died in Kew Green, London, leaving about 700 known paintings and drawings, along with over 750 book illustrations. Following the death of Tryphena Hughes in 1921, their daughter Emily had to move to a smaller house, so she had her father's remaining preparatory sketches, and all his private papers and correspondence destroyed.
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