April Love by Arthur Hughes (1832-1915). 1855-56. Oil on canvas. Arched top, 35 x 19 1/2 inches. Tate Gallery, London, Accession no. 2476. Kindly released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivitives licence (CC BY-NC-ND). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
When Hughes exhibited April Love at the 1856 Royal Academy exhibition, he included the following quotation from Tennyson's "The Miller's Daughter":
Love is hurt with jar and fret,
Love is made a vague regret,
Eyes with idle tears are set,
Idle habit links us yet;
What is Love? For we forget.
Ah no, no.
A study in blue, with only a little dappled sunlight on the clinging ivy, and the woman's eyes cast downwards on a scattering of fallen petals, the painting poignantly suggests the heartbreak that can accompany young love. Christopher Wood writes, "the mood of Hughes's pictures is always sad, wistful and tender" (53). — Jacqueline Banerjee
Commentary by Dennis T. Lanigan
Hughes exhibited this, his most famous picture, again at the Liverpool Academy, no. 80, and then at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857, no. 572. According to Robert Ross the landscape for April Love was painted in the garden of a Mr. Cutbush, at Maidstone, Kent, presumably Thomas Robert Cutbush who owned the plumbing and decorating business Hughes's father-in-law was the manager of. Leslie Parris, however, thinks most of the painting was done at 6 Upper Belgrave Place, Pimlico, where Hughes shared a studio with his friend the sculptor Alexander Munro. Munro is said to have been the model for the man in the background. Initially the face of the woman was modelled from a country girl, but she disliked the way Hughes was painting her and promptly left. Hughes's wife Tryphena was apparently the final model for the girl.
Hughes's painting is not, in fact, an illustration of Tennyson's poem "The Miller's Daughter" but portrays a quarrel between a pair of young lovers depicting what Parris referred to as "fragile young love" (137). The scene talks place in a summerhouse with a lilac bush visualized through the window in the background and features the rich blues, greens and purples Hughes commonly used in his palette. The young woman in her brilliant blue-purple dress looks anguished as she turns away from her lover and looks at the fallen rose petals. The shadowy figure of her lover crouches behind her, head bowed. Ivy is symbolic of everlasting love, and roses also suggest love, so the ivy and the rose petals strewn on the ground may perhaps indicate that the lovers quarrel has ended and the two are about to be reconciled.
April Love was the first of a number of paintings by Hughes showing lovers in a landscape, which were obviously influenced by the works of John Everett Millais, such as A Huguenot of 1852.
Hughes's picture was favourably received by artists within the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Ford Madox Brown wrote in his diary on 9 September 1855: "Last night I had the mulligrubs & went for the first time to Munros & saw Hughes picture of the Lovers quarrel - it is very beautiful indeed. The girl is lovely, draperies & all, but the greens of his foliage were so acid that made my mulligrubs worse I do think" (153). On 14 April 1856 William Michael Rossetti, in a letter to William Bell Scott about the Royal Academy exhibition, wrote: "Hughes sends a pretty subject and very pretty picture named April Love (Peattie, 65). John Ruskin when he saw the painting at the Royal Academy exhibition was enthusiastic about the work. He wrote in his Academy Notes: "Exquisite in every way; lovely in colour, most subtle in the quivering expression of the lips, and sweetness of the tender face, shaken, like a leaf by winds upon its dew, and hesitating back into peace" (68). It is likely that John Ruskin particularly admired the meticulous painting from nature, particularly the ivy in the composition. Ruskin brought his father to see the painting to try to induce him to buy it but this proved unsuccessful. He then tried to persuade his friend Ellen Heaton of Leeds to buy the painting, but after seeing it she turned it down as she disliked the expression on the face of the girl. In late November 1855 Ruskin wrote to her: "I am so sorry – but I did like the face in Hughes' picture – What would you have? the girl is just between joy & pain – of course her face is unintelligible, all a-quiver – like an April sky when you do not know whether the dark part of it is blue – or a raincloud" (177).
Eventually the painting was purchased at the Royal Academy exhibition by William Morris when he was still an undergraduate at Oxford. On 17 May 1856 Morris wrote to his friend Edward Burne-Jones: "Will you do me a great favour, viz go and nobble that picture called April Love, as soon as possible lest anybody else should buy it" (Kelvin I: 26). In her memorials of her husband Georgiana Burne-Jones recalled: "Morris had been greatly delighted by the picture of April Love and after brooding upon the subject for a few days made up his mind to possess it if it possible, but as by that time, he had gone back to his work at Oxford, he wrote up to Edward, asking him to see about its purchase" (131-32). Many years later in 1912 Hughes still remembered meeting Burne-Jones for the first time when he arrived at Upper Belgrave Place with Morris's cheque: "My chief feeling then was surprise at an Oxford student buying pictures" (Pall Mall Gazette, 13 July 1912).
Contemporary Reviews of the Painting
A reviewer for The Athenaeum didn't like the picture or for that matter Pre-Raphaelite works in general: "Of the same school, but with scarcely so much nature, is Mr. Hughes. His April Love (578), like most Pre-Raphaelite heads, looks distorted and large, and the texture is rather of porcelain than flesh. The leaves could all be sworn to be in a court of justice, but the colour is very pleasant" (622). W. M. Rossetti writing in The Spectator praised the picture but pointed out quite rightly that the figure of the man is difficult to visualize and interpret:
April Love. by Mr. Hughes, is full of grace and sweetness, – implying a delicate sensitiveness to the artist, which indues all he does, whether as regards conception or execution, with a character of beauty. In this picture, a fair golden-haired young girl is standing in a summer-house, ivy-grown and lilac-shaded, and yields her hand, timidly but not grudgingly, to a young man who kneels outside. There has evidently been a lovers' quarrel in the matter, and the tears upon her cheek are as much tears of gladness that it is over now as anything else. A blemish in the work is the uncomfortable way in which the man's head is introduced, so that it requires some scrutiny to know what it is, and what he is doing; and the green of the vegetation, especially where sunlight, inclines overmuch to a blueish tinge. [591]
W. M. Rossetti also reviewed April Love for the American publication The Crayon in 1856: "Besides these two dii majores of the P.R.B. reform [Hunt, Millais], there is Mr. Hughes, a young painter full of capacity and of a charming sense of beauty… [with] a picture named April Love, of a pretty girl in a summer-house, having her hand kissed by a young fellow through the wicket, and seeming to say to herself, "Shall I forgive him?" There has, evidently, been a bit of a quarrel, and now comes the pleading for reconciliation" (182).
Lucy Larcom was effusive in her praise of the painting in The Crayon:
Arthur Hughes is one of those artists who have adopted Pre-Raphaelitism as their rule in Art. He has painted several pictures of a very exquisite description, exhibiting most delicate and refined fancy, with an admirable feeling for expression, elegance, and color…But the picture upon which his name at present stands, was exhibited at the Royal Academy last year, entitled April Love , the motto of which was taken from Tennyson's famous song in "The Miller's Daughter." Never was a love poem more exquisitely illustrated than in this most beautiful picture; of all the illustrations of Tennyson with which the exhibitions of London of late years have abounded, there have been none so perfect as this; nor, we may say, is it possible to find in the range of the poet's works a more difficult subject to found a picture upon. A young girl, who has just awarded forgiveness to her lover for one of those offences which fretful love finds so frequent, allows him passionately to embrace her hand, while her face is turned away from him and towards the spectator. But how to describe that face we know not; its cheerful joy and tenderness, mixed with a sort of loving wonder, as if the reconciliation was a surprise so great that its pleasure could only mingle with girlish astonishment; the expression of struggling happiness about the mouth was a marvellous accomplishment of the artist's skill and deep feeling; her hair is brushed lightly from her face, as if disarranged while indulging in previous angry thoughts. The scene is a garden summer-house, in which the lover has found her by surprise, and now retains her hand, as he stoops over the back of the garden-seat, passionately pressing it to his face: she has on a gown of purple with a white body of muslin, and by her disengaged hand, with unconscious action, gathers up to her throat a long scarf of tissue, banded across with blue: the color and texture of this contrast admirably with the rest of the picture; in front a thick, clustering ivy plant clambers up a tree stem, which supports the garden-house, while through the window of this, behind and over the head of the stooping lover, the sunlight falls upon and through thick lilac blossoms and leaves, lighting the deeper parts of the picture with rich reflections: at her feet lie the petals of a ruined rose-blossom, which tells us upon what her pettish impatience has found vent either before his arrival or while he was obtaining forgiveness [327].
Studies
A preliminary pen-and-ink sketch for the composition is in the British Museum (accession no. 1916,1115.1). A pencil and brown ink washes study is in the Tate Britain (reference no. T00276). See also the reduced version, likely an oil sketch for the finished composition, which is in the collection of Lord Lloyd-Webber. An engraving was published in The National Magazine in December 1856 on page 129.
Bibliography
April Love. Tate. Web. 3 March 2025.
Barringer, Tim. The Pre-Raphaelites Victorian Avant-Garde. London: Tate Publishing, 2012, cat. 53. 68.
Burne-Jones, Georgiana. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., Vol. I, 1904.
"Fine Arts. The Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 1490 (May 17, 1856): 620-22.
Kelvin, Norman Ed. The Collected Letters of William Morris. Vol. I. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,1848-1880, 1984.
Larcom, Lucy. "The Two Pre-Raphaelitisms." The Crayon Vol. IV, Part XI (1852): 325-39.
Parris, Leslie. The Pre-Raphaelites. London: Tate Gallery, 1984, cat. 72. 137-38.
Roberts, Len. Arthur Hughes His Life and Works. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1997, cat. 29. 134-35.
Ross, Robert. "April Love", a Note. The Burlington Magazine XXVIII (February 1916): 171.
Rossetti, William Michael. "Art news from England." The Crayon III (June 1856): 181-83.
_____. "Fine Arts. The Royal Academy Exhibition." The Spectator XXIX (31 May 1856): 591-92.
Ruskin, John. "Academy Notes." The Works of John Ruskin XIV, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1904.
Surtees, Virginia, ed. The Diary of Ford Madox Brown. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981.
_____, ed. Sublime and Instructive. Letters from John Ruskin to Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, Anna Blunden and Ellen Heaton. London: Michael Joseph, 1972.
Wood, Christopher. The Pre-Raphaelites. New ed., pbk. London: Phoenix, 2000.
Created 27 April 2012
ast modified 3 March 2025