Friday, February 20, 2009

Arthur Hughes

Quite by accident, I stumbled yesterday across a painter who immediately won my admiration. You will, of course, recognize his school:


Ah yes, the pre-Raphaelites, famous for their heady symbolism, their hyper-realism, their wives and the mistresses they raised from poverty, their Edenic reds and golds, large chins (not Edenic), and a faerie medievalism. Yet this man, Arthur Hughes, does not appear in the typical list of pre-Raphaelites. He was one of the outside converts to the cause of Rosseti, Holman Hunt, Millais and the brotherhood, eventually becoming friends with many of them, helping them paint the Oxford Union Debating Hall in 1857. Though he acquired patrons and friends in the 50s, he made his career later, being a popular illustrator for Tennyson, George MacDonald, Christina Rossetti, and Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's School Days (a marvellous yarn).

You should look for his works online, they are plentiful. I only bring him to your attention for four reasons which cause him to stand out from his contemporaries. First, he paints just enough outline and contrast to cause the people and objects in his paintings stand out in all their individuated glory (as Holman Hunt in particular likes to do), while yet blending into the whole as if they were naturally situate, not contrived. I'm no art critic, but I think it may be because he uses a limited palate, so that all the objects in the painting are similar enough in tone and colour that they come to resemble one another. Second, I love his electric greens and purples. Third better than any the pre-Raphaelites I know, he recreates that quaint, cultivated, but slightly wild light which is the glory of the English summer (though only John Constable has made a truly compendious study of it). Fourth, he has a great deal of fun with medieval-style tryptiches and panels. In a word, he's more homely than the rest of them.

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