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Arthur Hughes - Back from Sea - Public domain scan / drawing
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The genesis of this painting began in 1857, when it was exhibited as The Mother's Grave. The original composition, known from a drawing in the Ashmolean, showed the boy desolate over the grave of his mother. The landscape was begun in the summer of 1856 in the old churchyard at Chingford, Essex. Around 1862, Hughes altered the background and added the figure of the sister, for which the artist's wife, Tryphena, posed. The detail is used to reinforce the pathos of the subject, so that the ephemeral nature of spider's webs, dew drops, dog roses and dandelion seeds all emphasise the theme of transience. The boy's loss is retold in the lamb separated from its mother by the barrier of the tomb.
Arthur Hughes (1832–1915) was born in London. Hughes was educated at Archbishop Tenison's Grammar School, and entered the School of Design, Somerset House, London in 1846, studying under Alfred Stevens. In 1847 he won an art studentship at the Royal Academy Schools, exhibiting his first picture, Musidora, at the Academy two years later. Although he never was a member of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he became very close to its ideals and style in 1850s. In 1857 he joined with Rossetti, Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and others in painting murals on the walls of the Oxford Union Debating Hall (now the Library), an effort which perhaps inspired his later Arthurian works such as The Knight of the Sun and Sir Galahad.
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