A Music Party by Arthur Hughes (1832-1915). 1862-64. Oil on canvas. 23 x 30 inches (58 x 76 cm). Collection of the Lady Lever Art Gallery, accession no. LL 3642. Image courtesy of the Lady Lever Art Gallery via Art UKunder the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence (CC BY-NC). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Hughes exhibited A Music Party at the Royal Academy in 1864, no. 62. Later that same year he exhibited it at the Liverpool Academy, no. 149. As it was purchased by the prominent collector George Rae by 1864 it was likely from this exhibition. When A Music Party was shown at the Royal Academy in 1864 it was accompanied in the catalogue by these lines from the second stanza of John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn":
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
The picture portrays a wife playing music to her husband and children. Hughes's wife Tryphena, his son Arthur Ford, and daughter Agnes served as models. When it was shown at the Royal Academy his friend Lewis Carroll recorded in his diary on 17 May 1864: "I could find no pictures more beautiful than Arthur Hughes's Music party , though many were very beautiful" (qtd. in Roberts, 156).
The Influence of Venetian High Renaissance Painting
Christopher Newall felt this work was influenced in its rich costumes and use of colour by Venetian High Renaissance painting, particularly works by masters like Titian and Veronese (83). Hughes had visited Italy, including Venice, in 1862 so such influences would have been fresh in his mind when he was painting A Music Party. During the 1860s artists within the Pre-Raphaelite circle were highly influenced by Venetian painting and Hughes proved to be no exception. Mary Bennett has suggested that music was particularly his theme in this painting,
with the lines of Keats' poem used to evoke a mood of wistful nostalgia and perhaps suggesting the transience of youth and departed friends, fleeting like the notes of music… Behind the woman playing her lute and her young companions absorbed in their thoughts, is a view across the Lagoon through the curved arches of a balcony, over a Venetian fishing smack lying below, to a church on an island in the distance. Studio props include the embroidered hanging and the child's embroidered kaftan which also appears in the nearly contemporary family portrait, set on a Venetian balcony, of Mrs. Leathart and her three children. The lute, an anachronistic harp-lute, popular in the early nineteenth century, appears in earlier paintings including The Rift within the Lute (60).
Contemporary Reviews of the Painting
A critic for The Art Journal noted that in this work Hughes's art had progressed in a more favourable new direction and away from the influence of the first phase of Pre-Raphaelitism:
A. Hughes, in past years not unfavourably known – when the so-called school of Pre-Raphaelitism was still in the ascendence – by pictures poetic in conception and fervent in intense and harmonious colour, is now seen in three laborious works, which come as a sequel to his earlier manner…. But considering all things – taking into account the reversal that has so suddenly and severely fallen upon the school in which Mr. Hughes was an earnest and honoured disciple – we think this painter may be congratulated upon his happy escape, without injury absolutely fatal. His offerings for the year, A Music Party' (62) … are each and all poetic and refined in conception, and singularly sensitive to delicate and harmonious modulations of colour. The figures, however, are lacking in manly vigour; they want the stamina and robustness which the greatest masters have shown not to be incompatible with beauty. [161]
F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum found Hughes's faces expressive but decried the purple tints of his flesh colouring: "Mr. Hughes has been the longest before the public, so let us give him place. Primarily, we cannot sufficiently regret this artist's persistent use of a certain purple tint in flesh painting which makes his work, that would otherwise be sweet and bright, look heavy, crude and opaque. This sorely mars the brilliancy of his colouring, and often renders a charmingly fanciful and original picture unpleasing to those who will not look over one obvious error. There is delicate fancy and much beauty in A Music Party (62); a lady with a lute plays a pathetic air, that moves a pretty child who leans against her knee and dreams with open eyes. Behind is a man whose thoughts are retrospective. All these faces are expressive in the highest degree; it is a pity that they suggest some weakness of a personal character. [651]
The Times described this picture as a
scene in Venice and a happy young father among his children hears the artless melody of his happy home, while his fair young wife strikes her lute. Delicacy, approaching dangerously near to sickliness sometimes, is the very element in which Mr. Hughes charms and works. His colour is exquisite in refinement, but prone to run riot in purples. This year he has been striving against this tendency, and has never before painted pictures in which the beauty and refinement were so little marred by his besetting purple. [14]
W. M. Rossetti in The Spectator found: "There is a dreamy charrn about Mr. Hughes's 'Music Party' (62) which grows on acquaintance" (592).
A critic for The Illustrated London News gave it very mixed review in which the principal concern was with the picture's colouring: "Arthur Hughes is unquestionably a painter of a refined and artistic organization," this reviewer accepted, "but he appears never yet to have found adequate technical expression for his conceptions. He seems almost morbidly addicted to the use of purple crude tints which creep into his flesh with very injurious effect: his colouring is patchy and generally inharmonious, though often lovely in passages; and his touch is laboured and niggling." Yet, the reviewer felt, "a person could scarcely be capable of true art-appreciativeness who could not recognize the graceful feeling in A Music Party (62), where an Italian lady plays on her lute a ditty of many memories to her pensive husband and wondering boy" (479).
Links to Related Material
- The Blue Bower by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
- The Music Master, by Henry Wallis
- Music, by Henry Holiday
- A Music Piece [The Drawing Room], by John Melhuish Strudwick
- A Symphony, by John Melhuish Strudwick
- A Musician, by Albert Moore
- The Music Lesson
- "Touching the Strings: Edith Martineau and Aestheticism"
Bibliography
Bennett, Mary. Artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Circle. The First Generation. London: Lund Humphries, 1988, cat. no. LL3642, 59-60.
"Fine Arts. Exhibition of the Royal Academy." The Illustrated London News XLIV (14 May 1864: 479.
Green, Roger Lancelyn Ed. The Diaries of Lewis Carroll. Vol. I. London: Cassell and Company, 1953.
Newall, Christopher. The Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016.
Roberts, Len. Arthur Hughes His Life and Works. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1997, cat. 58. 156-57.
Rossetti, William Michael. "Fine Arts. The Royal Academy." The Spectator XXXVII (21 May 1864): 592-93.
"The Royal Academy." The Art Journal New Series III (1 June 1864): 157-68.
"The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Times (30 April 1864).
"The Royal Academy of 1864." The Saturday Review XVII (28 May 1864): 657.
Stephens, Frederic George. "Fine Arts. The Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 1906 (7 May 1864): 650-51.
Created 10 March 2025