Arthur Hughes (artist)

It was here, after reading a copy of The Germ, that he met John Everett Millais, Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, although he never became an official member of the Pre-Raphaelite group of painters.

[2] After having his painting Ophelia hung near Millais' version of the same name, they became friends and Hughes served as the model for the male figure in The Proscribed Royalist.

They were inspired by John Everett Millais's earlier "couple" paintings but place far greater emphasis on the pathos of human inability to maintain the freshness of youthful feeling in comparison to the regenerative power of nature.

Like Millais, Hughes also painted Ophelia (which is housed at Toledo Museum of Art) and illustrated Keats's poem The Eve of St. Agnes.

He illustrated several books, including Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1869), George Macdonald's At the Back of the North Wind (1871) and The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and Christina Rossetti’s Sing Song (1872) and Speaking Likenesses (1874).