The Weary Moon. 1911. Watercolour and gouache with gold and silver. 8 ½ x 5 ½ inches (22 x 14 cm). Private collection, image courtesy of Sotheby's, London. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Hughes showed this work at the Winter Exhibition of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1911, no. 305. It might have been inspired by stanza 2 of Shelley's poem "To the Moon," published in the Moxon edition of the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by W.M. Rossetti:
Art thou pale for weariness,
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
When Hughes's watercolour sold at Sotheby's in 2017 their experts, with the assistance of Victoria Osborne, commented:
The present work is one of a group of watercolours by Hughes depicting the Roman Moon Goddess Diana in her form as Selene, an incarnation in which she took the form of the planet itself. In the present picture she is in her crescent shape in the moon's early phase of the lunar cycle surrounded by golden clouds and silvery stars. Her naked body is contoured with silver paint in emulation of similar experimental pictures by Edward Burne-Jones painted in the 1890s. It is perhaps significant that this picture was given by Hughes to Burne-Jones' studio assistant Thomas Rooke who had witnessed his master painting dancing figures and moon-maidens in such a way his later years. A year before painting The Weary Moon, Hughes exhibited a set of pictures at the Royal Watercolour Society, Waxing Moon, Waning Moon, Radiant Moon and Shrouded Moon. In 1913 he painted a variant of the present picture entitled Pack, Clouds, Away! And Welcome Day (20).
Bibliography
Osborne, Victoria. Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite & British Impressionist Art. London: Sotheby's (13 July 2017): lot 14, 20-21.
Created 12 May 2026