Arthur Hughes
(b London, 27 Jan 1832; d Kew Green, London,
22 Dec 1915).
English painter and illustrator. In 1846 he
joined the School of Design at Somerset House, London, under
Alfred Stevens. The following year he won an art
studentship to the Royal Academy Schools, where in 1849 he
won the silver medal for antique drawing. In the same year
he showed his first painting at the Royal Academy,
Musidora (Birmingham, Mus. & A.G.), a conventionally
painted nude. In 1850, while still a student, he saw a copy
of the periodical The Germ, which converted him to
PRE-RAPHAELITISM and led to his meeting William Holman Hunt,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown, though he never
became an official member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Hughes’s first exhibited work in the new style, Ophelia
(exh. RA 1852; Manchester, C.A.G.), was admired by Millais,
whose own Ophelia (1851–2; London, Tate) was in the
same exhibition. They became friends and Hughes sat for
Millais’s The Proscribed Royalist (exh. RA 1853; priv.
col.). From about 1852 to 1858
Hughes shared a studio with the sculptor Alexander Munro.