Arthur Hughes, portrait study for 'The Proscribed Royalist', 1852

Sir John Everett Millais Bt. PRA (1829 - 1896)

RA Collection: Art

This portrait study of the artist Arthur Hughes (1832-1915) is a preparatory drawing for the head of the cavalier in Millais' painting The Proscribed Royalist, 1651 (1853; Private Collection). Hughes, a fellow student of Millais's at the Royal Academy Schools, recalled that he was in the Academy's Library one evening 'looking at books of etchings' when 'Millais came in and sat down beside me...he asked me to sit to him for a head in his picture, 'The Proscribed Royalist '. I went and sat 5 or 6 times. He painted me in a small back room on the 2nd floor of the Gower Street house, using it instead of the regular studio on the ground floor because he could get sunshine there to fall on his lay figure attired as the Puritan Girl...'. This drawing was possibly made in the RA Library or at one of the first of these sittings.

Millais frequently decided on the theme and composition of his paintings before choosing the sitter and he sometimes used more than one model for a figure. In his early career, Millais often used friends and family as sitters instead of hiring professional models. This drawing of Hughes is similar to studies of F.G. Stephens that Millais used for the face of Ferdinand in Ferdinand Lured by Ariel and Lorenzo in Isabella and Lorenzo (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool).

In the painting The Proscribed Royalist,1651 a Puritan woman protects a fleeing Royalist after the Battle of Worcester during the English Civil War. The Royalist hides in a tree and kisses the hand of the Puritan woman who has brought him bread.

There is a related sketch in the Birmingham City Art Gallery and Museum (Inventory number 585'06).