It may be that this attempt to explain the impression of Mr. Hughes's work is a purely personal one, but it is one that intimate study for many years strengthens and raises to the unassailable position of a positive fact. At the risk of appearing mawkishly sentimental, even with the greater risk of reflecting sentimentality upon artistic work which it has not, this impression of Mr. Arthur Hughes's art must be set down unmistakably. Looking upon it from a purely technical aspect, you might find much to praise, and perhaps a little to criticise; but, taking it as an art addressed often enough to the purpose of forming artistic ideals in the minds of the young, you cannot but regret that the boys and girls of to-day, despite the army of artists of all ranks catering for them, cannot know the peculiar delight that the children of the sixties and early seventies enjoyed.
Arthur Hughes was born in London in 1832, and became a pupil of Soames of the Royal Academy Schools, exhibiting for the first time at the annual exhibition in 1854. In 1855 appeared, as we have just seen, The Music-master. The artist seems to have worked fitfully at illustrations, but his honourable labours in painting dispose of any charge of indolence, and, did but the scope of this work permit it, a still more interesting record of his artistic career could be made by including a list of pictures exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Institute, the Grosvenor, the New Gallery, and elsewhere. Between 1855 and 1861 I have found no illustrations, nor does he himself recall any. In the latter year there are two designs in The Queen to poems by George Mac Donald and F. Greenwood. The next magazine illustration in order is At the Sepulchre in Good Words, 1864. In 1866 appeared an edition of Tennyson's Enoch Arden, with twenty-five illustrations by Arthur Hughes.' This noteworthy book is one of the essential volumes to those who make ever so small a collection of the books of the sixties. Although the work is unequal, it contains some of his most delightful drawings. In the same year London Society contained The Farewell Salutation. In 1867 George Mac Donald's Dealings with the Fairies was published. This dainty little book, which contains some very typical work, is exceptionally scarce. Another book which was published in 1868 is now very difficult to run across in its first edition, Five Days' Entertainment at Wentworth Grange, by F. T. Palgrave, illustrated with seventeen designs, the woodcuts (sic) being by J. Cooper, and a vignette engraved on steel by C. H. Jeens.
ARTHUR HUGHES
'GOOD WORDS'
1871, p. 33
THE LETTER
ARTHUR HUGHES
'GOOD WORDS'
1871, p. 183
THE DIAL—'SUN COMES,
MOON COMES'