Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Hughes, Arthur
HUGHES, ARTHUR (1832–1915), painter, the third and youngest son of Edward Hughes, of Oswestry, was born in London 27 January 1832, and educated at Archbishop Tenison's grammar school, Castle Street, Long Acre. He revealed in early boyhood so irresistible an inclination towards art that in 1846, at the age of fourteen, he was allowed to join the school of design at Somerset House, where, under Alfred Stevens, he worked with such industry that in the following year he secured an art studentship in the Royal Academy schools. There, two years later (1849), he won the silver medal for antique drawing, and attained, at the age of seventeen, a place on the walls of the annual exhibition for a painting of Musidora.
Hughes was, therefore, at a critical stage when the founding of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood (1848), and especially the publication (1850) of the first number of its short-lived periodical, The Germ, determined once for all the lines along which his artistic individuality was to be developed. That art must be founded directly upon nature down to its smallest details; that nothing was insignificant; that the least leaf or flower was as deserving of loving care as the most outstanding feature in the picture, was, put very briefly, the creed which he then adopted, and followed faithfully through a long and productive career.
This adhesion to the principles of the pre-Raphaelites, though he never assumed the title of a brother, brought Hughes into intimate connexion with those young enthusiasts. He at once won the approval of Ruskin; Millais painted him in 1853 as ‘The Proscribed Royalist’; William Morris bought his picture of ‘April Love’, now in the Tate Gallery, in 1856; and in 1857, on Rossetti's invitation, he took part in the decoration of the Oxford Union, contributing a panel depicting ‘The Death of Arthur’. It was, perhaps, this preoccupation which prevented his following up at the Academy of 1857 the success in 1856 of his exquisite triptych of ‘St. Agnes' Eve’; but in 1858 he exhibited ‘The Nativity’, which with its pendant, ‘The Annunciation’, and ‘The Long Engagement’, is now in the municipal art gallery at Birmingham. Thenceforward for fifty years, with some exceptions, he was regularly represented by one or more works, the last of which, ‘The Rescue’, appeared in 1908, while many of his pictures passed direct from the studio to the owners. Few of these are now accessible to the public, but among them is ‘Home from Sea’ (1863) in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which disputes with ‘The Knight of the Sun’, painted about 1859, the claim to be his most perfect achievement.
Hughes's earlier works naturally received their share of the extraordinary storm of abuse which burst upon the innovators, but he cannot be said to have obtained his just proportion of the approbation which followed when the reaction came after no long time. It would be untrue to speak of him as a neglected genius, for he earned for himself no small amount of appreciation and patronage, but he never succeeded in capturing that general renown to which his accomplished workmanship and imaginative charm certainly entitled him. The tender vein of poetry which inspired all his paintings was too easily missed among more clamant appeals; the delicate schemes of colouring which he mostly favoured were too apt to be eclipsed by some glaring neighbour; and even the relatively small area to which his painstaking representation of detail was best adapted may have played its part in diverting attention to more spacious rivals.
His numerous contributions to the art of book-illustration undoubtedly gained for him a more extensive body of admirers, though it is possible that few of these were aware of the name of the man who signed his work with a little Gothic monogram. Beginning in 1855 with William Allingham's The Music Master, he illustrated editions of Tom Brown's Schooldays (1869), Tennyson's Enoch Arden (1866), Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses (1874) and Sing Song (1872), T. G. Hake's Parables and Tales (1872), and George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and Phantastes (1905); he also produced numbers of separate drawings for stories and poems in Good Words and other periodicals.
Hughes's life apart from his work was uneventful. He married in 1855 Tryphena Foord, by whom he had two sons and three daughters. For about ten years he held a position as examiner at the art schools, South Kensington, but this was his only official recognition. Residing on the outskirts of London, he remained of his own choice almost entirely apart from general society, being seldom seen even in those assemblies where his fellow-artists met together; and his death at Kew Green, 22 December 1915, in his eighty-fourth year, must have come as a surprise to many who remembered his unaggressive share in the strenuous rebellion of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.
[Private information.]