Enchanted Dreams: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of E.R. Hughes

ER Hughes, Night with her Train of Stars, 1912 (Birmingham Museums)

Birmingham Museums Trust is world famous for its collection of works by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their followers. This exhibition will reveal a fascinating but lesser known Pre-Raphaelite artist: Edward Robert Hughes (1851-1914), who painted Birmingham Museums’ most popular watercolour Night with her Train of Stars (1912). 

Nephew of the painter Arthur Hughes, model to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and studio assistant to Holman Hunt, ER Hughes lived and worked at the heart of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. The watercolours he exhibited in London just before the First World War – such as the fairy vision of Midsummer Eve (1908) – are among the most familiar and most often reproduced images in British art. Yet surprisingly Hughes himself has often been overlooked and his name is little known. 

Enchanted Dreams will be the first exhibition ever dedicated to Hughes and his work. It will bring together paintings, drawings and watercolours from public and private collections in the UK and overseas, many of them unseen in the hundred years since the artist’s death. The exhibition will feature Hughes’s delightful child portraiture and exquisite chalk drawings as well as the magical late ‘blue pictures’ such as Night with her Train of Stars which have become famous and loved worldwide.

A programme of talks, special events and workshops will accompany this exhibition.

In the Gas Hall. 

Admission charges:

Adult: £7.00Concession: £6.00Child under 16: £3.00Family ticket: £17.00

To book tickets phone 0121 348 8038 or Book Online.

Image credits:



ER Hughes, Night with her Train of Stars, 1912 (Birmingham Museums).



ER Hughes, Midsummer Eve, 1908 (private collection).



ER Hughes, 'Oh, What's That in the Hollow...?', 1893 (Royal Watercolour Society).

Event location

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