Home from Sea [The Mother's Grave]. 1856-57, retouched c.1862. Oil on panel. 20 ½ x 26 ½ inches (51 x 65 cm). Collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Image courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum reproduced for purposes of non-commercial academic research. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Hughes began the landscape for the painting in the summer of 1856 in the churchyard of Old Chingford Church at Chingford, north of London in Essex. The figure of the boy was added later in the spring of 1857. Its original composition showed only the young sailor boy lying face down and weeping on the grave of his mother who has just recently died. The boy has obviously gone straight from his ship to the churchyard, hence the bundle of his clothes laid on the ground along with his straw hat (Treuherz 182). The original composition of the painting is known from a preliminary pen and ink drawing at the Ashmolean Museum [Roberts, cat. 33.2] and by contemporary reviews. By circa April 1857 the painting in this form was complete. It was rejected for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1857 but was exhibited as such, and entitled The Mother's Grave, at the First Pre-Raphaelite Group Exhibition, no. 35, held at 4 Russell Place, Fitzroy Square that opened in the late May of 1857. It was among the three works Hughes sent to the Exhibition of Modern British Art in America in 1857, but it was exhibited only at the New York venue, no. 83. Its title then was listed as Home from Sea – The Mother's Grave.
Hughes then revised the painting in 1862, to add the sister and modify the background slightly. This is the version he then exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1863, no. 530. Hughes much later described the modifications he made to the picture in a letter of 6 Januar 1901 to his friend the writer William Hale-White: "Well, about that Sailor boy picture – I called it though Home from Sea and it represented a young sailor lad in his white shore going suit, cast down on his face upon the newly turfed grave where his mother had been put in his absence – his sister in black kneeling beside him: his handkerchief bundle beside – Sunshine dappling all with leafy shadows – old Church behind with yew tree painted at Old Chingford Ch: Essex: it was bought of me by John Trist of Brighton. At the time I painted it my wife [Tryphena Foord] was young enough to sit for the sister: and I think it was like" (Tate Gallery Archives, qtd. Parris 197). The boy may have been modelled by his nephew Edward Robert Hughes (Warner 105).
The finished composition shows the boy weeping on his mother's grave which is not yet marked by a headstone. His elder sister, dressed in mourning black, kneels by his side. The landscape is painted in a meticulous early Pre-Raphaelite manner with detailed studies of flowers, foliage, and grasses. The yew trees depicted are traditionally seen in burial grounds. The painting is filled with symbolic references to the transience of life related through the ephemeral nature of spider's webs, dew drops, dog roses and dandelion seeds (see Ashmolean website). Warner has pointed out that the most prominent plant in the foreground is a dandelion, which is a common Christian symbol of grief that appears often in paintings of the Crucifixion. He adds: "Even the vignette of sheep in the background relates metaphorically to the story of the boy and his mother; as they are separated by death so the ewe and lamb are separated by a gravestone" (Warner 105).
Allen Staley has pointed out that, in contrast to The Long Engagement where there is no spatial depth, Hughes does attempt to establish space within this picture:
There is a ground plane which recedes to the church at a recognizable distance in the background. The foreground details such as the flowers on the trunk of the trees to the right and the branches above the figures are highly finished, but they do not fill the picture, and, consequently do not seem as obtrusive as the foliate detail in The Long Engagement. In some respects – shape, placement of figures, intensity of greens, sheep in the background – Home from Sea is closer to Holman Hunts' Hireling Shepherd than to any picture by Millais. However, if we recall the dependence of Hughes's earlier paintings upon those Millais, it is probably correct to see the opening-out of his art as part of the same pattern, in this instance depending more upon The Blind Girl than upon Autumn Leaves. [85-86]
Timothy Hilton had mixed feelings on this work:
But Hughes's best-known picture is Home from Sea, painted out of doors on the best Pre-Raphaelite principles, and showing a sailor boy who returns from a man's world to fall in sorrow across his mother's fresh grave, not praying but crying. The motif was adapted from Holman Hunt's etching My Lady in Death, which it appeared in the first number of The Germ. It is a painting which, admittedly, is very precariously balanced on the indefinable borderline in Victorian art between the moving and the mawkish; and its exact position there is perhaps one of personal taste, for sentimental people find it poignant, while others may regard it as merely soppy" (118).
Contemporary Reviews of the Painting
When this work was shown at the First Pre-Raphaelite Group Exhibition in 1857 the reviewer for The Critic felt the sunny atmosphere of the picture failed to convey the correct mood for mourning: "The Mother's Grave by the same, presents the converse mode of treatment. A sailor-lad stretched upon the grave of his parent, in wild grief, while the village churchyard lies basking as it were in the sultry sun of July – bright, gleaming, and joyous. Nothing here is sombre, nothing reminds us of death, or the cold chill of the tomb. The colours are not exactly those of the objects they are intended to present; the artist has missed the true green of nature. This gives the whole rather an artificial look, but the painting is one which is difficult to behold unmoved, so intense is the expression of grief and despair in the boy, whose face is not seen, but whose clasped hands indicate what is passing within. [280]
When the painting was shown in New York in 1857 the American publication The Crayon admired the pathos of the story that was effectively portrayed: "Home from Sea - The Mother's Grave, by Arthur Hughes, seems to be a painter's puzzle. Ruskin has said that the checkered sunlight is the finest thing of the kind he ever saw. For ourselves, we are quite indifferent to the technical problems involved in an analysis of the merits; the picture tells its story effectively; it is brilliant with light, and it is of most pathetic treatment" (343).
When the revised painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1863 it was not widely reviewed. The Art Journal said merely: "Home from Sea (530), by A. Hughes, a sailor-boy prostrate in a graveyard, is 'Pre-Raphaelite' in finish" (113). A reviewer for The Illustrated London News liked the genuine pathos expressed but disliked its Pre-Raphaelite intensity of colour: "Mr. A Hughes's Home from Sea (530) is a very touching picture of a sailor-boy conducted by a sister, after, perhaps, his wilful absence, to a simple grave in the village churchyard where sleeps, with no recording stone, perchance, a broken-hearted mother. There is a genuineness of pathos here not often found in similar works, but the colouring has an inharmonious intensity – it is nature seen with fevered vision" (543).
Bibliography
"Fine Art Gossip." The Athenaeum No. 1550 (11 July 1857): 886.
"Fine Arts. The Royal Academy." The Illustrated London News XLII (16 May 1863): 542-43.
Hilton, Timothy. The Pre-Raphaelites, London: Thames and Hudson, 1970.
Home from the Sea. Art UK. Web. 6 March 2025.
Parris, Leslie. The Pre-Raphaelites. London: Tate Gallery Publications/Penguin Books, 1984, cat. 120. 197.
"Pre-Raffaelite Pictures." The Critic XVI (15 June 1857): 280.
Roberts, Len. Arthur Hughes His Life and Works. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1997, cat. 33. 139-40.
"Sketchings. American Exhibition of British Art." The Crayon IV (November 1857): 343-44.
Staley, Allen. The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. 85-86.
"The Royal Academy." The Art Journal New Series II (1 June 1863): 105-16.
Treuherz, Julian. The Pre-Raphaelites. Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, 2009, cat. 64.
Warner, Malcolm. The Victorians. British Painting 1837-1901. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1997, cat. 23. 105.
Created 14 September 2004
New version of page, 6 March 2025.