Twilight Phantasies. 1911. Watercolour and gouache on paper. 30 1/4 x 41 7/8 inches (76.7 x 107.9 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Maas Gallery, London. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Hughes exhibited this watercolour, surely one of his finest and most beautiful works, at the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours Summer Exhibition in 1911, no. 24. The title may have been inspired by lines 109-12, stanza XIII, of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats" written in 1821:
And others came…. Desires and Adorations,
Winged Persuasions and veil'd Destinies,
Splendours, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies;
Another possible source of inspiration is the song "Twilight Fantasies" composed by Frederick Delius in 1899. The painting shows an attractive young woman kneeling against a gnarled trunk of a tree and playing a flute. From the crook propped on the tree trunk above her right shoulder, she appears to be a shepherdess. A lighted lantern can be seen by her right leg. The time of day is twilight allowing Hughes to emphasize his favourite blue palette as the shepherdess's music seems to produce, as if by magic, an array of small fairies and miniature knights riding horses. The fairies appear in two groups, one group of which forms a circle. In the background is a winding stream surrounded by a meadow and clumps of trees and with a row of hills visible in the distance. Hughes's use of light is remarkable in this seemingly nocturnal picture, particularly the way the twilight illuminates the arms and face of the young woman.
Fairy pictures were important in Hughes's oeuvre. As early as 1891 he had shown Dealing with the Fairies at the Winter Exhibition of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours. Victoria Osborne has also pointed out the importance of twilight to Hughes as an artist: "Hughes presents these ambiguous times of day as both mysterious and charged, offering a gateway into unseen spiritual or even supernatural realms. In Twilight Phantasies a shepherdess plays a pipe at sunset, conjuring up a cavalcade of tiny winged figures and supernatural knights on horseback" (83).
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Bibliography
Maas, Rupert. Pre-Raphaelites and Romantics. London: Maas Gallery 1989, cat. 31.
Osborne, Victoria Jean. "A British Symbolist in Pre-Raphaelite Circles: Edward Robert Hughes RWS (1851-1914)." M. Phil. thesis, University of Birmingham, 2009. 83.
Created 11 May 2026