A Study for a Picture (Study for Fra Filippo Lippi). Red chalk on paper. 26 x 18 1/8 inches (66 x 46 cm). Collection of Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead, object no. BIKGM.1099. Image courtesy of Wirral Museums Service, reproduced for purposes of non-commercial academic research. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Hughes exhibited this drawing of a hooded figure at the Winter Exhibition of Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours in 1893, no. 276. The model is probably Orazio Cervi, who posed regularly for the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft and is also known to have posed for Hughes. Victoria Osborne has described this highly finished drawing as:
a half-length depiction of a young man in the habit of a monk, standing in an Italianate garden and toying with the petals of a rose. It was exhibited simply as Study for a Picture, but the artist's inscription within the image, along the top right edge, of a quotation from Robert Browning's poem Fra Lippo Lippi," identified the figure as the Quattrocento artist Fra Filippo Lippi (c.1406-1469). Hughes had exhibited a watercolour of the subject, in which the figure is depicted at full-length, in the summer exhibition the same year, accompanying it in the catalogue with the same quotation:
All the Latin I construe is,
"Amo," I love!
Hughes's drawing is virtuoso display of chalk technique in which the young man's features are sensitively modelled in softly-graded areas of tone and the effect of light shining through the semi-transparent fabric of his hood is deftly captured. [49-50]
This is one of a group of paintings and drawings by members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle featuring Italian Renaissance artists at work. Other examples include D.G. Rossetti's watercolours of Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante of 1852, Dante Drawing the Angel (The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice) of 1853, and his drawings Giorgione Painting and Fra Angelico Painting, both of c.1853; Frederic Leighton's Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna of 1853-55, Simeon Solomon's watercolour The Painter's Pleasaunce of 1861, and Henry Wallis's oil painting of Paul Veronese painting the Portrait of Sir Philip Sidney of 1864. Even as late as 1930, John Collier painted Fra Filippo Lippi in his Studio.
Contemporary Reviews of the Drawing
When it was exhibited in 1893 a reviewer for the St. James's Gazette described it as "a drawing for a picture of Robert Browning's favourite painter" (qtd. Osborne, 50). F. G. Stephens found this drawing to be particularly praiseworthy: "Far wholesomer is the study in red chalk of a hooded head called For a Picture (276), being Mr. Hughes's noteworthy contribution to this gallery last summer. It is, in several respects, the finest work here" (813).
Bibliography
Cruise, Colin. Pre-Raphaelite Drawing. London: Thames & Hudson, 2011. 201.
"The Old Water-Colour Society." St James's Gazette (4 December 1893): 7.
Osborne, Victoria Jean. "A British Symbolist in Pre-Raphaelite Circles: Edward Robert Hughes RWS (1851-1914)." M. Phil. thesis, University of Birmingham, 2009. 49-50.
Stephens, Frederic George. "The Society of Painters in Water Colours. Winter Exhibition of Sketches and Studies." The Athenaeum No. 3450 (9 December 1893): 813-14.
Created 13 May 2026