Eleanor Hughes
Aotearoa New Zealand / England, b.1882, d.1959
Apple tree
- Dry point etching
- Purchased, 2001
- 400 x 270mm
- 2002/10
Tags: buildings (structures), fruit, horizon line, houses, landscapes (representations), natural landscapes, trees, urban landscapes
New Zealand expatriate painter Eleanor Hughes had settled in Cornwall, England by 1908, where she became part of a group of artists known as the Newlyn school. By 1927 she had established an etching press in her studio and was producing etchings with a clarity and assurance of line that was ideal for her interest in depicting trees. It is likely that Eleanor taught herself etching with help from her fellow artist and close friend Laura Knight, who was also a highly accomplished and respected etcher.
Ink on Paper: Aotearoa New Zealand Printmakers of the Modern Era, 11 February – 28 May 2023
Exhibition History
(The Moon and the Manor House, 12 November 2021 – 1 May 2022
Eleanor Waymouth was born in Christchurch into privileged circumstances, the eldest daughter of Frederick and Alice Waymouth, who in 1899–1900 built Karewa, a grand Arts and Crafts house in Fendalton that was later renamed Mona Vale. While taking selected classes at the School of Art, and having private tuition from newly arrived artist Charles N. Worsley in 1901, she also began exhibiting with the Canterbury Society of Arts. Eleanor left for England in 1904 to study with Frank Spenlove-Spenlove in Beckenham, Kent, and with Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes at Newlyn. She exhibited with the Society
of Women Artists in London in 1905 and returned to New Zealand later that year. By 1908, Eleanor was back in Cornwall, where in 1910 she married fellow student Robert (‘Bertie’) Morson Hughes; they became key members of the Newlyn artist set. She built a strong reputation for her watercolour tree studies and for her etchings, as a 1929 review noted: “She paints and etches with a clarity, and assurance of line, that enable her to express cool tree-subjects in a way that is as pleasing as it is all her own.”