Spending one’s days studying the
avant-garde of the early twentieth century, it’s sometimes none too easy to stop and
think about what those artists were actually reacting against. What were most
gallery-goers actually looking at and admiring when David Bomberg, for example,
was painting his extraordinary abstracts in the years immediately prior to the
First World War? Edward Robert Hughes – Ted Hughes to
his friends – was one of them: his ‘blue phantasies’ at the Royal Watercolour
Society’s annual summer shows were among the crowd pleasers – curious visions
of fairyland and mystical interpretations of Victorian poems.
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| E.R. Hughes, Oh, What’s That in the Hollow? (1893) |
Hughes was born
to be an artist. His uncle was the painter Arthur Hughes, a painter with closes
link to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in its earliest days, who numbered Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Ruskin among his friends. So,
literally from the cradle, Hughes lived among artists and critics. He entered
the Royal Academy Schools aged 16, and was something of a star pupil. Though he
worked in oil, it was in watercolour that he would make his name. The early
work is very different in style and technique from the later works – though it
can be equally haunting. ‘Mrs Peveril Turnbull and her daughter Monica’ feels
like an illustration to an M.R. James short story, even before you discover
that Monica and her sister were later to die together in a house fire.
This show lines up many other artists
along side Hughes, but he often comes off looking second best to the likes of Henri
Fantin-Latour or Fernand Khnopff (sadly in reproduction only). Hughes is
certainly the lesser painter, but nonetheless a work such as ‘Oh, What’s That
in the Hollow? (1893) and ‘Night With her Train of Stars’, are really something
special. I can’t imagine the Bloomsbury Group caring for any of this – and the
Futurists certainly did not when they visited London: it was exactly this sort
of painting that seemed to the Italians to say nothing of the ‘Workshop of the World’, let alone of London, the Futurist city 'par excellence'. Indeed, they thought paintings like this ought to be carried out into Trafalgar Square and burnt, making way for a modern art of a modern world. But Hughes's paintings carry me back to the days of my youth when I first discovered the delights of
the Pre-Raphaelites. And I know - unlikely as it may seem - that it was just this sort of painting that inspired the likes of Augustus John, Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer and helped set them out on the road to
becoming artists.
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| E.R. Hughes, Night With her Train of Stars and Her Great Gift of Sleep (1912) |
And besides, in a way there's nothing wrong with fairyland, when it's taking you away from the miseries of what industrial Britain must have been like. It is quite easy to see the appeal of these medieval fantasies for a smoke-filled world, stalked by slow or sudden death and opium dreams. (Hughes' fiancee died a lingering, youthful death from tuberculosis, such a killer in that era, even among the wealthier classes; and night with her stars in tow drops poppy petals - and does the baby in her arm sleep the sleep of night, or that of death?.) The best of these Victorian artists are always worth revisiting, and even as a critic of the avant grade, I can linger profitably in a world at a cross roads, where the nineteenth century meets the twentieth.
