       |
Life
1865-1941; b. 27 Jan., at 21 Portland Place, Dublin; son of a carpenter; ed. Christian Brothers O'Connell School, N. Richmond St.; Dublin Metropolitan School of Art [var. Museum]; spent some time studying in England but returned to DMSA [now NCAD] in Dec. 1888-90; awarded one-year schol. to S. Kensington Art School, 1890; studied there under Edouard Lanteri; went on to Académie Julian and Colorossi's Academy in Paris, and visited Italy afterwards; appt. second art master at Pymouth Technical School - where his friend Frederick Shelley established the Plymouth School of Art - and afterwards appt. instructor in modelling at the London Metropolitan Art School, where he taught Sarah Purser [q.v.] and Beatrice Elvery [Lady Glenavy, q.v.]; appt. prof. of sculpture at Royal Hibernian Academy, [1893]; sculpted a head of George (“Æ”) Russell (now in Hugh Lane/Municipal Gallery of Modern Art); successfully exhibited his “Finding of Eurydice” at RHA, 1898; completed life-size bronze of Charles Kickham for Tipperary town; elected MHRA, 1900; exhibited "The Springtime of Life" there, 1901; sculpted “Man of Sorrows” and “Madonna and Child” for Loughrea Cathedral, Co. Galway; sculpted marble seated figure of Provost George Salmon [q.v.] for TCD, 1902;
author of Queen Victoria - with plaque reading, ‘Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, erected by her Irish subjects’ - commissioned for Leinster House, premises of the Royal Dublin Society, at her death in 1903; moved to Paris to conduct the work, which was unveiled by Lord Aberdeen in Feb. 1908 but later removed to Royal Kilmainham Hospital in 1948; subsequently accepted by the Australian Govt. in 1987, and adopted as centre-piece of an urban conservation scheme in Sydne, 1991; some supporting bronzes, incl. a dying Irish soldier [in the Boer War] overlooked by Erin, installed in the roof-garden of Dublin Castle Conference Centre, 1990; and made altar reliefs for Queen’s College, Cork, 1916; also sculpted a W. E. Gladstone Memorial figure, commissioned in 1909 and intended for the Phoenix Park, but vetoed by the Dublin Corportaion in 1919 and ultimately installed instead at Hawarden in 1925; founding-member of Royal Society of British Sculptors, he later resigned when work dried up; lived in Florence, with a sister, 1920-26; moved to Paris, and later settled in Nice, where he died, 6 June 1941; his remains were dispersed in the public ossory after the statutary five years. RIA/DIB
[See Diarmaid Ferriter, “Hughes, John”, in Dictionary of Irish Biography (RIA & Cambridge 2009) - available online. Ferriter quotes Hughes’s view of sculpture as nature evoked but ’with rhythm dominating realistic representation’, and records George Russell's shifting view of him as ‘a man of genius’ and quotes his pronouncing that ‘the precision and delicacy of the modelling is something quite new in Ireland’ when Hughes’s “Finding of Eurydice” was exhibited at the RHA in 1898.]
Criticism
Alan Denson, John Hughes, Sculptor 1865-1841: A Documentary Biography (Kendal 169), 516pp. 193 ills. [ltd. edn. of 150].
Commentary
George (“AE”) Russell - letter to Sarah Purser, 5 March 1902: ‘Hughes has never betrayed to anyone here any sign that he once lived in Ireland. Nobody has heard from him. I expect he is working from before dawn to bed time on his Irish fusiliers who are to guard the statue of the Queen. I wish the Queen had never died and we might have had another Orpheus and Eurydice. I feel sad over it, but I suppose it will turn out all right. I can’t imagine John becoming an Onslow Ford. [...].’ (Alan Denson, ed. Letters from AE, London: Abelard-Schuman 1961, p.40.)
Brian Fallon, reviewing John Turpin, Oliver Sheppard 1865-1941 (Dublin: Four Courts), remarks that Oliver Sheppard’s [q.v.] ‘richly gifted contemporary, John Hughes, never lived down his association with Dublin Castle.’ (In ‘‘Brief’’ [notices], Times Literary Supplement, 3 Aug. 2001, p.28.)
[ top ]