Left: Day. Pencil and watercolour. 10 1/4 x 7 1/2 inches (26 x 19 cm). Right: Night. Pencil and watercolour, heightened with gouache, gum arabic and gold. 10 3/8 x 7 7/8 inches (26.4 x 20 cm). Private collection; all images on this page courtesy of Christie's. Images not to be reproduced; right click disabled.
Day, and Night are two of the most beautiful of Hughes's symbolist works. Day is personified by the head of a golden-haired maiden with a row of pink-and-white wild roses circling her head while Night is a dark-haired beauty wearing a double row of stars as a crown. When this work sold at Christie's in 2004 their expert, likely John Christian, likened it to symbolist works by G.F. Watts or Edward Burne-Jones: "This attractive pair of heads are typical of Hughes, falling somewhere between his idealised portraits of female sitters and his more symbolist compositions. They are essentially in the same vein as Night with her Train of Stars, a picture of 1912 which has become his most famous work since it was included in the Last Romantics exhibition at the Barbican in 1989…. Hughes's taste for such cosmic symbolism may owe something to G. F. Watts. Another precedent would be Burne-Jones' allegorical figures of Day and Night, executed for the Liverpool shipping magnate Frederick Leyland in the early 1870s (Winthrop Collection; Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard)."
Full-length standing figures of Day and Night by Hughes's friend Simeon Solomon sold at Christie's, London, initially on July 11, 2013, lot 48 and then again later on July 29, 2020, lot 97. In Solomon's paintings Day is shown as a partially naked male youth holding a flaming brass brazier in his right hand while Night is a raven-haired maiden with half-closed eyes, clad in blue, and holding a flaming torch in her right hand.
Bibliography
British and European Art. London: Christie's (13 December 2022): lot 2. https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6408803
The British Sale: Part Two. Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours. London: Sotheby's (15 June 2000): lot 404.
Important British and Irish Art. London: Christie's (9 June 2004): lot 25. https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-4295744
Created 13 May 2026