Hugh Thomson

Life
1860-1920; b. Coleraine, June 1860; ed. Model School; first worked for Marcus and Ward, Belfast; moved to London, 1883 and began working in London for Macmillan and the English Illustrated Magazine; 70 books incl. Jane Austen novels from 1894; ill. Sir Roger de Coverley (1886); The Vicar of Wakefield (Macmillan 1890), with 180 ills. by him; ; other English classics including Thackeray, George Eliot, Dickens, J. M. Barrie; also, Maria Edgeworth, and Mrs. Gatskill’s Cranford, etc. Illustrated for the Graphic. d. Wandsworth Common; plaque in Coleraine; Flowerfield lecture by Phil Tilling. etc.; d. May 1920; exhibition at Leicester Galleries, London, 1923; also Linen Hall, Belfast, 1970; copious work in Pearl Pictorial, Graphic, and Pall Mall Gazette; collab. with Stephen Gwynn on Highways and Byways; The Fair Hills of Ireland; The Famous Cities of Ireland; Hugh Thomson, sale of work at Ross Auction, Belfast, April 2001. DIB

Works
The Ballad of Beau Brocade, for Austin Dobson (1892); ills. for School for Scandal [1911], and Famous Cities of Ireland (Dublin: Maunsel 1915), xx, 352pp.; also [inter al.], Shanachie, An Irish Miscellany Illustrated (1906-1907).

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Criticism
M. H. Spielman & Walter Jerrold, Hugh Thomson: His Art, His Letters, His Humour and His Charm (1931) 269pp.

Commentary
Stephen Gwynn wrote, ‘If ever I wanted to prove that Belfast, and Protestant Belfast, is irrevocably Irish, I should have to produce Hugh Thomson.’

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