Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 39,000 USD
21 5/16 x 14 in.
signed ARTHUR HUGHES (lower left)
oil on panel
This work is a version of Arthur Hughes' Royal Academy submission of 1865, no. 554
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Arthur Hughes - The Mower
Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 39,000 USD
21 5/16 x 14 in.
signed ARTHUR HUGHES (lower left)
oil on panel
This work is a version of Arthur Hughes' Royal Academy submission of 1865, no. 554
Arthur Hughes - Perran Point, Cornwall
Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 8,640 GBP
29 by 40 1/2 cm., 11 1/2 by 16 in.
signed l.r.: ARTHUR HUGHES
oil on board
According to Leonard Roberts Perran Point was painted around 1895 at a time when Arthur Hughes painted several charming marine studies in Cornwall, including Newquay Headland From the Warren, The Towan, Newquay and Saint Agnes' Head, Cornwall. In each of these small panels Hughes captured the rugged wilderness of the Cornish coast in times of tranquility when the cliff-tops are covered by a verdant wealth of grass and salt-loving flowers and the sea is a beautiful shade of azure blue. His studies of ocean from the vantage of the cliffs found its most impressive expression in the two versions of Threads of Fate in 1887 and 1889 in which a young women is mending the nets on a rock far above an inlet where a solitary fisherman is rowing into shore. Around 1889 Hughes also painted the similar painting A Cornish Welcome in which two young children wave from the cliff tops at the unseen fleet below.
Hughes continued to paint these views throughout his life and clearly found great pleasure in landscape painting, for which he had a great talent. Although he is now well known for his Pre-Raphaelite romatic paintings of knights and damsels, his quality as a landscape painter is perhaps not as recognised as it should be.
Edward Robert Hughes - night and day
part of a pair
a pair, one signed l.l.: ER Hughes, the other signed l.l.: E.R.HUGHES
one watercolour and bodycolour over traces of charcoal heightened with gold paint and white, the other watercolour (2)
each 25.5 by 18.5 cm., 10 by 7 1/4 in.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Pre-Raphaelites and Photography
Were the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who looked to the new science of photography in their quest to capture every nuance of nature, the original Photo Realists? The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., holds the premiere of "The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848-1875," Oct. 31, 2010-Jan. 30, 2011, a show organized in association with the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, where it appears Mar 6-May 29, 2011. Boasting 100 photographs and 20 paintings and watercolors by everyone from Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll to John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the exhibition looks at "changing concepts of vision and truth. . . in the Victorian era." The show is organized by Diane Waggoner, and is accompanied by a 240-page catalogue with 200 illustrations.
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/preraphaeliteinfo.shtm
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Art for art's sake: V&A to celebrate aesthetic movement
[Detail from Pavonia by Frederic Leighton, one of the pre-Raphaelite artists who will feature in the exhibition. Photograph: c/o Christie's/Private collection]
At a time of anxious austerity it could be just what is needed: an examination of one of the most flamboyant and joyously bohemian art movements there has ever been.
The V&A announced today that it is to mount the first ever major exhibition devoted to the aesthetic movement of the late 19th century, looking at a group of artists who placed the importance of beauty above everything else and followed a mantra that said let us value art for art's sake.
The show will bring together 300 objects, including 60 paintings, to celebrate a British movement that flourished between 1860 and 1900 and whose members included pre-Raphaelite artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Frederic Leighton as well as Oscar Wilde and William Morris.
Co-curator Stephen Calloway said now was a particularly good time to shine a spotlight on the aesthetes. "In times of austerity fantasy always seems to be the thing, but I think it's particularly interesting at the moment because people, I suspect, are becoming rather tired of ugliness and things which are not well made and art that isn't well drawn."
Calloway said there was much contemporary art and design that was not aiming to be beautiful or comfortable to live with. "So the idea of looking at an art movement where, consciously, beauty and quality are central ideas seems to me extraordinarily timely.
"A lot of people would like a return to a kind of art and a kind of decoration that is all about pleasure of the eye and the beauty of being within a complete environment."
The aesthetes were passionate and serious-minded, reacting against Victorian values which said that all art had to have a purpose and also against a kind of pervading ugliness seen, for example, at the 1851 Great Exhibition, with its rather hideous and huge furniture.
It started out as a group of people amusing themselves in their own houses, becoming a wider movement that people were eager to buy in to. It was the first art movement to inspire an entire lifestyle. Suddenly the middle classes were aspiring to create their own beautiful interiors and Liberty became purveyors of all that was gorgeous.
The show will include numerous loans from private collections – including Andrew Lloyd Webber's – and will also feature paintings which use models who were not conventionally beautiful by the standards of the day. Women such as Elizabeth Siddal, a model for many of the pre-Raphaelites, whose pale skin and copper red hair was held to be ugly by most Victorians.
Of course not everyone was won over and enchanted by the aesthetes, and the show will include Punch magazine cartoons satirising the movement and a novelty teapot by James Hadley which poked fun at Wilde and his belief that by surrounding yourself with beautiful things you become beautiful. The spout is a man's effete arm in the air and the inscription reads: "Fearful consequences, through the laws of natural selection and evolution, of living up to one's teapot."
The exhibition, which will travel to Paris and San Francisco, also marks the first sponsorship of a V&A show by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/sep/14/victoria-albert-aesthetic-movement-exhibition
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