'A feast for the eyes, mind and heart': Visitors hail 'revelatory' exhibition of forgotten painter
Enchanted Dreams: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of E.R. Hughes. Until 21 February 2016.
You may think you know these magical pictures from posters and greetings cards, but there’s so much more to discover. That’s the message from visitors to the Enchanted Dreams exhibition, running until 21 February in the Gas Hall at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. The first ever exhibition of the British artist Edward Robert Hughes (1851-1914), Enchanted Dreams is revealing a forgotten painter of extraordinary talent.
“The response we’ve had from visitors to the exhibition has been fantastic,” comments Victoria Osborne, Curator of Fine Art for Birmingham Museums Trust, who has been researching Hughes’s life and art for seven years. “They’ve been amazed and inspired by the range and quality of Hughes’s work. Many visitors have told us they came to the exhibition for Hughes’s famous fairy pictures, after seeing them on posters and greetings cards , and that the other works – especially his portraits and exquisite drawings – came as a complete surprise. The show has been a real revelation.”
Enchanted Dreams is proving to be a landmark for Birmingham Museums, putting this unsung master of British art back into the spotlight where he belongs. Sadly, the exhibition is as ephemeral as one of Hughes’s fairy visions: when it ends on 21 February, his paintings and drawings will once again be dispersed across the world. Many of the works in the exhibition – including one of Hughes’s best-known pictures, Midsummer Eve – are on loan from private collections and are unlikely to be displayed together again for generations.
At the heart of the exhibition is Night with her Train of Stars (1912), which belongs to Birmingham’s own collection. It was given to the city in Hughes’s memory by the artist’s friends a century ago, in 1914. Night with her Train of Stars has become the most popular watercolour in Birmingham’s collection, captivating visitors with its intense colour, shimmering blue and gold surface, and tender imagery. “Hughes imagines Night as a gentle, maternal figure, cradling a sleeping child in her arms and scattering poppies, which symbolise sleep and oblivion,” explains Victoria. “Her ‘stars’ are a crowd of lively cupids who follow behind bearing shimmering lights. She gently hushes them so they don’t wake the sleeping child. The image is touching and comforting, but also has a darker poignancy: Hughes’s Night is an angel of death as well as sleep.”
Enchanted Dreams explores the hidden stories behind some of the most familiar images in British painting. It takes visitors on a journey through Hughes’s life and art, from his Pre-Raphaelite childhood to the luminous ‘blue phantasies’ like Night with her Train of Stars that he exhibited in London just before the First World War. “I wanted visitors to leave feeling that they had got to know Hughes as a man as well as a painter,” says Victoria Osborne. “The exhibition includes paintings and photographs of Hughes which really bring him to life. We meet him not only as an established artist, but as an angelic toddler in an early painting by his uncle Arthur Hughes, and as the beautiful young man whose good looks inspired artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti.”
“Hughes was a victim of changing fashion in his own lifetime,” adds Victoria. “His works were painted with extraordinary finish and detail, but this kind of technique, together with his interest in fairy subjects and stories from literature, made his work seem increasingly old fashioned in the years before the First World War. When he died in 1914 he was almost immediately forgotten, and it took decades for him to be rediscovered and reassessed.”
Now, a century after his death, Enchanted Dreams gives a first opportunity to appreciate fully Hughes’s technical brilliance and his distinctive imagination. “It’s easy to underestimate his talent, because his pictures are so immediately appealing. But this exhibition reveals other facets of Hughes: his perceptive and brilliant portraits, and his wonderful drawings in pencil and coloured chalks. By bringing his works together in one exhibition, Hughes is revealed as technically outstanding – a virtuoso draftsman and superb technician – but also as an artist who was in touch with some of the progressive developments in European art as well as the British art scene. Above all, Enchanted Dreams shows that Hughes had a rare and enduring gift: to inspire a profound emotional response. Visitors have told us again and again that they have not only enjoyed the exhibition but been deeply moved by it.”
Victoria adds: “Works like Night with her Train of Stars and Midsummer Eve have become part of popular culture worldwide on greetings cards, posters and the internet, but are rarely seen in the original. This exhibition allows us to experience their extraordinary subtlety and beauty at first hand. But there is so much more to discover about ER Hughes than his famous fairy pictures. Enchanted Dreams is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rediscover this gifted artist and his work.”
Enchanted Dreams: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of E.R. Hughes, including a magical Fairy Glen for children, runs at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery between 17 October 2015 and 21 February 2016. The Museum and Art Gallery is open Monday – Sunday 10am – 5pm, except Fridays 10.30am – 5pm (closed 24 – 26 December). Admission to the exhibition is Free for Children under 16, £7 Adults, and £6 Concessions. Online booking is available.
For more details, call 0121 348 8038 or visit www.birminghammuseums.org.uk.
ENDS
Photographs are available by following the links at the bottom of this email, or from http://news.cision.com/birmingham-museums
Notes to Editors
Birmingham Museums Trust is an independent charity that manages the city’s museum collection and venues on behalf of Birmingham City Council. It uses the collection of around 800,000 objects to provide a wide range of arts, cultural and historical experiences, events and activities that deliver accessible learning, creativity and enjoyment for citizens and visitors to the city. Most areas of the collection are designated as being of national importance, including the finest collection of Pre-Raphaelite art in the world. Attracting over 1 million visits a year, the Trust’s venues include Aston Hall, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Blakesley Hall, Museum Collections Centre, Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, Sarehole Mill, Soho House, Thinktank and Weoley Castle. www.birminghammuseums.org.uk
Arts Council England champions, develops and invests in artistic and cultural experiences that enrich people’s lives. It supports a range of activities across the arts, museums and libraries – from theatre to digital art, reading to dance, music to literature, and crafts to collections. Great art and culture inspires us, brings us together and teaches us about ourselves and the world around us. In short, it makes life better. Between 2015 and 2018, Arts Council England plans to invest £1.1 billion of public money from government and an estimated £700 million from the National Lottery to help create these experiences for as many people as possible across the country. www.artscouncil.org.uk
Edward Robert Hughes: Summary
The young Hughes was remembered by his family as ‘a handsome, loving, brilliant boy… wild for painting’. Born in London in 1851, he received his first training in art from his uncle, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Arthur Hughes. He spent his childhood surrounded by his uncle’s artistic and literary friends, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, John Ruskin and Lewis Carroll. As Hughes grew up, his striking good looks led to his modelling for Rossetti, as well as for his friend and fellow artist Simeon Solomon.
Hughes took lessons at Heatherley’s art school in London, before entering the Royal Academy Schools at the age of 16. He was an outstanding student, winning a silver medal for the best drawing from a classical sculpture two years later.
After graduating from the Royal Academy, Hughes spent the 1870s and 1880s establishing a career as a portrait painter. Alongside his portraits Hughes began producing large, ambitious watercolours, often inspired by poetry, stories and plays. From 1891, he exhibited twice a year at the Royal Watercolour Society in London. In 1893, he showed the haunting ‘Oh, What’s That In the Hollow…? ‘, based on a poem by Christina Rossetti. Described by one contemporary reviewer as ‘The most dreadful sight in the gallery’ and ‘horribly fascinating’, it depicts a young redheaded man lying dead, with wild roses twining around his body. Around the same time – and in total contrast – Hughes was commissioned to illustrate three books of Italian tales written in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, which were published in new translations in the 1890s. These bawdy stories, with their broad comedy and frank sexuality, allowed him to explore more daring subjects.
From the late 1880s Hughes worked as studio assistant to the veteran painter William Holman Hunt (1827-1910). Hunt had been one of the founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 and Hughes idolised him, calling him ‘the Maestro’. In the last years of his life, Hunt suffered from glaucoma and progressively lost his sight. Working in secret, Hughes helped him to complete his last great painting The Lady of Shalott (c.1888-1905, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut) and the third and final version of The Light of the World in St Paul’s Cathedral, which bears Hunt’s name but is in fact largely by Hughes. Hughes never spoke publicly about any of his work for Hunt, but the veteran artist privately called Hughes his ‘dear Right Hand’.
From 1905 onwards Hughes made a series of large watercolours exploring the themes of twilight, night and dawn. Lyrical in mood, and often depicting floating or flying figures representing times of day, these have become his best-known works.
Lenders represented in Enchanted Dreams include the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford; the Art Workers’ Guild; Bruce Castle Museum, Haringey; the Castle Howard collection; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Maidstone Museum & Bentlif Art Gallery; the National Portrait Gallery; the National Trust for Scotland; the Royal Collection; the Royal Watercolour Society; the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead.
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