cipal art gallery at Birmingham. Thenceforward for fifty years, with some exceptions, he was regularly represented by one or more works, the last of which, ‘The Rescue’, appeared in 1908, while many of his pictures passed direct from the studio to the owners. Few of these are now accessible to the public, but among them is ‘Home from Sea’ (1863) in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which disputes with ‘The Knight of the Sun’, painted about 1859, the claim to be his most perfect achievement.
Hughes's earlier works naturally received their share of the extraordinary storm of abuse which burst upon the innovators, but he cannot be said to have obtained his just proportion of the approbation which followed when the reaction came after no long time. It would be untrue to speak of him as a neglected genius, for he earned for himself no small amount of appreciation and patronage, but he never succeeded in capturing that general renown to which his accomplished workmanship and imaginative charm certainly entitled him. The tender vein of poetry which inspired all his paintings was too easily missed among more clamant appeals; the delicate schemes of colouring which he mostly favoured were too apt to be eclipsed by some glaring neighbour; and even the relatively small area to which his painstaking representation of detail was best adapted may have played its part in diverting attention to more spacious rivals.
His numerous contributions to the art of book-illustration undoubtedly gained for him a more extensive body of admirers, though it is possible that few of these were aware of the name of the man who signed his work with a little Gothic monogram. Beginning in 1855 with William Allingham's The Music Master, he illustrated editions of Tom Brown's Schooldays (1869), Tennyson's Enoch Arden (1866), Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses (1874) and Sing Song (1872), T. G. Hake's Parables and Tales (1872), and George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and Phantastes (1905); he also produced numbers of separate drawings for stories and poems in Good Words and other periodicals.
Hughes's life apart from his work was uneventful. He married in 1855 Tryphena Foord, by whom he had two sons and three daughters. For about ten years he held a position as examiner at the art schools, South Kensington, but this was his only official recognition. Residing on the outskirts of London, he remained of his own choice almost entirely apart from general society, being seldom seen even in those assemblies where his fellow-artists met together; and his death at Kew Green, 22 December 1915, in his eighty-fourth year, must have come as a surprise to many who remembered his unaggressive share in the strenuous rebellion of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.
[Private information.]
HUGHES, Sir SAM (1853–1921), Canadian soldier and politician, was born in Darlington township, Durham county, Ontario, 8 January 1853, the third son of John Hughes, a native of Tyrone, Ireland, by his wife, Caroline Laughlin. He was educated at the local schools, the Toronto normal and model schools, and at the university of Toronto, where he took honour standing in modern languages in 1880. From 1875 to 1885 he taught English literature and history in the Toronto Collegiate Institute; but he turned more and more to political life, and in 1885 removed to Lindsay, Ontario, where he became owner and editor of the Lindsay Warder, the chief conservative newspaper of the district, continuing to hold this position till 1897. In 1891 he stood unsuccessfully as conservative candidate for the federal house in Victoria county, Ontario; but in 1892 he was successful at a by-election, and continuously represented the constituency till his death.
From very early days Hughes took a deep interest in military matters, especially in shooting. In 1870 he was a volunteer in the defence forces raised against a Fenian raid from the United States; in 1873 he was gazetted a lieutenant in the 45th militia regiment, and steadily rose till in 1897 he became its lieutenant-colonel. Meanwhile he had offered to raise battalions for the Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns. In 1899, on the outbreak of the Boer War, he went to South Africa with the Canadian contingent as an ‘attached’ officer, but quarrelled with his commanding officer and joined the British forces, in which he held several positions, ending as a dashing leader of irregulars. In 1911 he attended the coronation of King George V; in October of the same year he became minister of militia and defence in the Cabinet of (Sir) Robert Borden, and did much to promote the building of drill halls and the training of cadet corps in the schools. He was promoted major-general in 1912. At the opening of the European War he showed fine energy, and it was largely owing to his efforts that
276
