Home from Work [or Evening]. Arthur Hughes (1832-1915). c.1870. Oil on canvas, H 75 x W 106.5 cm. Collection: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, accession number: BORGM 01112. Purchased from George Knight, 1932. Kindly made available by the Gallery on the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence. [Click on the image for a larger picture.]
Here is another of Hughes's "engagingly fresh landscapes" (Wildman), again with nearly every element that the Times obituary found in his most appealing work: "No artist ever painted spring meadows, country children, and frisking lambs, with more evident delight." However, the lambs are replaced here by a milk-white calf, while the blossom and cowslips, the latter mostly picked and strewn carelessly on the grass, give an extra fillip to the scene. The way the child reaches out to her weary-looking father, as he returns from his wood-gathering with her older brother, is especially touching. So too is her elder sister's affectionate watchfulness. The general sense of harmony between domestic and natural life, of everything thriving together, is very cheering. Such an atmosphere is an added element that no amount of training can help a painter capture. It is no surprise to learn from Stephen Wildman that Hughes was a genial soul — modest, good-natured and "universally liked."
The gallery note explains the variation in the title of the painting: "When exhibited at the Royal Academy it was called Evening; at an exhibition in Glasgow in 1873 it was called After Work; it was referred to as The Return in a letter written by Ford Maddox Brown in 1886; and when sold in 1921 it was re-titled Home from Work."
This is a genre picture featuring a woodland backdrop popular both in early photography and Pre-Raphaelite art. Millais's The Woodman's Daughter comes to mind, although that was inspired by Coventry Patmore's sad poem of the same title, about a girl who was eventually seduced by the squire's son — with dire consequences. Hughes's painting, however, is focussed on a smaller child in the woodman's family, and she is not charged with any ominous or negative associations. Quite the contrary. — Jacqueline Banerjee
Commentary by Dennis T. Lanigan
As noted above, this painting was originally called Evening when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871, no. 1025, and was subsequently referred to as After Work when it was exhibited in Glasgow in 1873, no. 425. It was reworked in 1913 and very little of the original paint remains. As Len Roberts has explained the figure of the mother, which in the original version was lifting the small child from her older sister's lap, has been painted over. The child is therefore no longer gazing at her now absent mother's face but at her father returning from work (Roberts 178). The original composition can be gleaned from an oil sketch for the picture of c.1870, now in a private collection, that sold at Dreweatts, Newbury, on 12 June 2024, lot 146 (Roberts, cat. no. 109.2):
Study for Evening. c.1870. Oil on board. 13 ½ x 18 ½ inches (34 x 47 cm). Private collection. Image courtesy of Dreweatts.
This late painting, now known as Home from Work, is not to be confused with Hughes's earlier painting of Home from Work of c. 1860-61, once in the Leathart collection and now in Tate Britain.
Contemporary Reviews of the Picture
A critic of The Art Journal liked the "sentiment ... tenderness or quietude" the painting expressed:
Refinement, poetry of sentiment, and delicious quality of colour, we are almost sure to find in Arthur Hughes; Evening (1025) is responsive to the Shakespearean lines, –
So service shall with steeled sinews toil,
And labour shall refresh itself with hope.
An old man bears firework on his back: it is evening, and he has reached the evening of life when toil is well-nigh ended. Children seated in the gloaming are in keeping with the spring-time and the budding, blossoming woods. The picture is pleasantly suggestive to fancy. Were it stronger it were better; and yet we could not afford to lose any of the tenderness or quietude. [178]
F. G. Stephens in The Athenaeum expressed concerns regarding draughtsmanship of the figures while praising Hughes's handling of the landscape: "Disproportions of a similar kind to those of this figure appear in Evening (1025,) – labourers returning home, – a picture of which, in drawing also, is hardly worthy of Mr. Hughes: on the other hand, we have exquisite feeling for nature and the expressions of several faces, and then the sentiment and colour of the landscape: notice the capital painting of the calf, which lows a welcome to the wayfarers, and the head of the dead apple-tree on our right" (693).
Bibliography
Home from Work [Evening]. Russell-Cotes. Web. 7 March 2025.
"Mr. A. Hughes" (obituary). The Times, 23 December 1915: 6. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 28 March 2019.
Newall, Christopher. The Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016.
Roberts, Len. Arthur Hughes His Life and Works. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1997, cat. 109. 178-79.
"The Royal Academy." The Art Journal New Series X (1 July 1871): 173-80.
Stephens, Frederic George. "The Royal Academy." The Athenaeum No. 2275 (3 June 1871): 691-93.
Wildman, Stephen. "Hughes, Arthur (1832–1915), painter." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Web. 28 March 2019.
Created 28 March 2019
Last modified 14 March 2025