Night Toilers. Arthur Hughes (1832-1915). Oil on board, 11 x 17¼ inches; signed. Purchased for 25gns at FAS 1900 by Charles Fairfax Murray; Murray sale, Christie's, 20 January 1920 (64); bought for 14gns by Sampson. Courtesy of the Maas Gallery, London. [Detail] Click on image to enlarge it.
According to the gallery website, “Arthur Hughes outlived all the other Pre-Raphaelites, attending their funerals and even assisting as pall-bearer at Holman Hunt’s in 1910. Moving from Pre-Raphaelitism to landscape, he fell in love with Cornwall after a holiday there in 1887. The view in this picture may be of Mount’s Bay from Porthleven. It was included in Hughes’s first one-man exhibition, held at the Fine Art Society in 1900 when he was 68. It sold very well and attracted excellent notices, such as this from FG Stephens ('Mr Arthur Hughes’s Landscapes', Athenaeum, 14 July 1900, p 64): ‘Fishing-boats at sea that are distinguished chiefly by the spectral lustre of their lanterns, and are almost lost in the gloom of the cloudy moonlight which wholly hides the neighbouring land.’”
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Created 20 April 2020