One of the late 19th/early 20th centuries' most popular illustrators, Hugh Thomson, is not necessarily well-known today. However, an opportunity to become better acquainted with his work arises next week when Belfast auction house John Ross & Co sells 150 examples of the Coleraine-born artist's work. Ross's has occasionally included one of Thomson's pictures in previous sales, but this is certainly the first time such a large collection of material will have come up at auction. The entire group has come from an American collector who obviously realised there would be more interest in Thomson on this side of the Atlantic. Hugh Thomson was born in June 1860 and after spending some years during his teens working for a local linen mill, he found employment with the Belfast artprinting works Messrs Marcus Ward & Co. However, discovering insufficient opportunity here to develop his unquestionable talents as an illustrator, in 1883 he moved to London where he began an association with the publishing house of Macmillan & Co and the newly-issued English Illustrated Magazine. It was in this publication that much of his earliest work appeared. Thomson's first great success was with a series of drawings to accompany Bert Harte's Sir Roger de Coverley trilogy, published in 1886 as Days with Sir Roger de Coverley. Four years later, Macmillan's published a lavish edition of Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield containing no less than 180 illustrations by Thomson; this sold out in just three weeks. Thomson also illustrated four books by the poet Austin Dobson, beginning in 1892 with The Ballad of Beau Brocade. Dobson would later write of Thomson:
Your thoughts must be as clear as day; You see the shapes that you portray, And make them move and live again In black and white.
During the remainder of his life, Thomson continued to produce copious amounts of work for a variety of popular magazines such as Pears Pictorial, the Graphic and Pall Mall Magazine.
In addition, he illustrated almost 70 books, among the most successful of which were the works produced to accompany Jane Austen's novels beginning with Pride and Prejudice in 1894. However, his native country was not neglected; in 1899, Thomson collaborated with the author Stephen Gwynn on a book called Highways and Byways in Donegal and Antrim. The success of this work led to two further books with an Irish theme: The Fair Hills of Ireland in 1906; and The Famous Cities of Ireland nine years later. Gwynn was to write that: "If ever I wanted to prove that Belfast, and Protestant Belfast, is irrevocably Irish, I should have produced Hugh Thomson." J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, said Thomson was "a man who drew affection at first sight, so unworldly, so diffident". The artist died in May 1920, a month short of his 60th birthday. There was a memorial exhibition of his work at London's Leicester Galleries in 1923 and several Thomson retrospective shows have been held in Belfast, the most recent in 1970 at the Linen Hall Library. Nonetheless, because it is a long time since such a large collection of his illustrations has been offered for sale, Ross's is not fixing any pre-sale estimates on the lots. Colour illustrations are expected to fetch around £1,000-£1,200 each and black and white pictures should sell for perhaps half this figure or less. The auction takes place at 7 p.m. on Thursday in the auction house's own rooms.
