BUDDUG ANWYLINI PUGHE (Welsh, 1856-1939) watercolour – Aberdyfi jetty, signed and dated 1929, 17 x 25cms
Auctioneer's Note: the artist Buddug Pughe was born into a family steeped in Welsh culture and intellect. Her father John (1815-1874) was trained in medicine at St Thomas’s Academy in London, where he qualified as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1838. He then returned to Wales and began to practice in Abermaw (Barmouth). The following year he married Catherine Samuel, the daughter of the Caernarfon shipbuilder Samuel Samuel and in 1842 they moved to Aberdyfi. In 1853, Dr Pughe was elected as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. As well as being a J.P, he was a keen advocate of the Welsh language and an antiquarian who served as Secretary of the Cambrian Archaeological Society.
Buddug’s aunt, Eliza Pughe (1826-1847) was a gifted artist and before her very early death at the age of only 21, she had compiled a pictorial Welsh-English Dictionary which Buddug later presented to the National Library of Wales.
Buddug Pughe was born in Aberdyfi and her natural talent as an artist was evident from an early age. With her family’s encouragement she was sent to study at the Liverpool School of Art and she later also studied in Paris and in Rome. Her earliest works were largely portrait miniatures and from 1886-1900 she exhibited at the Royal Academy as a ‘Miniature Painter’, from a Liverpool address. At the same time, she was embarking as a regular exhibitor at the Liverpool Art Exhibitions, held at the Walker Art Gallery, where she would continue to show and sell her work for the next 50 years. By the later 1890’s she had largely moved away from working as a miniature painter and much of her subsequent work consists of landscapes and architectural subjects. As well as painting a good deal in Wales, she travelled extensively on the Continent, painting in France (especially Brittany), Italy (especially Venice), Spain and Belgium. She exhibited her ‘Dolgellau Fair’ at the Royal Academy in London in 1924 and she won a prize at the Birkenhead Eisteddfod in 1917, with her war-inspired oil painting ‘The Quiet Village’.
Her favoured medium was always watercolour, but she was also an accomplished painter in oils, including genre subjects, landscapes and portraiture. Her fine oil portrait of Dr T F Roberts, Principal of the University of Wales, together with portraits of Dr Roberts’s parents, is in the collection of National Library of Wales, and her oil portrait of her father is in the National Museum of Wales. She painted many beautiful watercolours in and around Aberdyfi, some of which still remain in the possession of the families for whom they were painted.
As interest grows in female painters, the work of the Welsh artist Buddug Anwylini Pughe certainly deserves to be better known.
Provenance: private collection Gloucestershire