"Silver and Gold" by Arthur Hughes

Silver and Gold

Arthur Hughes

Source: Magazine of Art 6 (1883): 66

In 1883 the Hughes was part of “the collection got together by Mr. Trist at his house in Brighton.”

“There is probably no house in which the tender and loveable art of Mr. Arthur Hughes can be better studied than in Mr. Trist's. His "Silver and Gold" . . . come[s] nearer to what the public reckons as Pre-Raphaelite than any other of the works we print; for they are "purist "in feeling and filled with almost infinite detail of grass and leaf and flower. If the Pre-Raphaelite movement did nothing else, it at least strung up the energies of our young painters to put into their pictures not only all they knew, but whatever they could think and feel. [Commentary continued below]

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The charming contrast of youth and age to which the title of "Silver and Gold" has been given, tells its tale too plainly to need description in the text. Except that he is a timid and imperfect draughtsman, and somewhat too sweet and over-gentle, it is difficult to understand why Arthur Hughes should have failed of those academic honours which have fallen to the lot of men of far more ordinary endowments. I know of no modern picture more poetical in feeling or more exquisite in colour than his "Morte d'Arthur" nor has any one drawn Ophelia more lovely or more pathetic. In the Trist collection you see him always exquisitely tender and true in colour, always sweet and wholesome in sentiment : Whether he appears in some lovely English landscape with flowery foreground; or in that sketch for "The King's Orchard" (made famous by Mr. Ruskin's praise in 1859 — the well-remembered apple-blossom year at the Royal Academy); or in the charming group of children in church dabbling their fingers in live sunbeams. In the matter of execution, the patience and dexterity of such pictures as that of the sailor-boy at his mother's grave, with its dewdrops and cobweb and Chingford Church covered with innumerable ivy leaves, are notable indeed; while in "Enid and Geraint," and another picture of a female head, he has given us the quintessence of English womanhood, with its loveliness, its purity, and its sweetness of disposition” (69-70).

Bibliography

Monkhouse, Cosmo. “A Pre-Raphaelite Collection.” Magazine of Art. 6 (November 1882-October 1883): 62-70. Internet Archive version of a copy in the University of Toronto Library. Web. 8 September 2013.

Last modified 8 September 2013