Arthur Hughes
1832–1915 · United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland · Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The story
When Arthur Hughes finished April Love in 1856, he was 23 and already fluent in a new kind of painting. A young woman in a shimmering violet dress turns away in a shadowed bower, half in doubt, half in tears, while her lover kneels and kisses her hand out of the light. The designer William Morris bought it straight off the wall, and it hangs today in Tate Britain.
Hughes had caught the fever early. In 1850, still a teenager, he read The Germ, the short-lived magazine of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and sought the group out, meeting Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Ford Madox Brown. He was never a member himself, only 16 when the Brotherhood formed, but he took its habits to heart, sharp detail, jewel colour and real feeling in place of academic polish.
He kept painting tender, faintly melancholy scenes of young love and childhood, then spent decades as a book illustrator, drawing for Christina Rossetti's nursery rhymes and the fairy tales of George MacDonald. He outlived the movement by half a century and died in 1915, long after the Pre-Raphaelite moment had passed.
