An exhibition about the pre-raphaelite artist E R Hughes will be held in the North Transept, St Albans Cathedral and Abbey Church from 24th April to 5th May 2014.

The artist Edward Robert Hughes worked at the heart of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and was a close associate of many of its leading members. Hughes lived in No 3 Romeland, next door to St Albans Abbey, had his well-attended funeral in the Abbey, and is buried in the Hatfield Road Cemetery, but is little known here in St Albans.

Hughes died on April 23rd 1914, and a group of St Albans citizens and organisations, including the St Albans Museums and Galleries Trust, local business, cultural organisations, and educational establishments, have prepared a Centenary Commemoration Display of his life and work to be opened in the Cathedral on April 24th and run until May 6th 2014.

The display, organized with the support of Victoria Osborne, Curator at Birmingham Museums and a leading authority on Hughes, will remind us of Hughes’s position as a major painter in his own right, who exhibited at the Royal Watercolour Society, and whose work is found in several major public collections, including Birmingham Museums and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

The exhibition will also reflect on Hughes’s other work, and his relationships within the Pre-Raphaelite circle. He was the nephew of a major Pre-Raphaelite painter, Arthur Hughes, and modelled for members of the group. In his early career he time spent in the studio of Holman Hunt, one of the pre-eminent Pre–Raphaelites, who painted The Light of the World.

St Albans was host, in the later years of his life, to an eminent artist who was closely involved with one of the most important art movements of the 19th century, but who is little known in the City where he lived and died. We aim to rectify that situation in 2014.

NB Due to the scarcity and delicate condition of Hughes extant work, and the open location, no original material will be shown.