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‘Evening, Richmond’. Believed to have been exhibited at a Royal Academy show. Image: The Salesroom.
Annie Hugill (1870-1945) water-colour artist and plaster model-maker, was born in Keighley, the daughter of an accountant. She specialised in painting moorland scenes and seascapes and lived at Briar Bank, Highfield Lane, Keighley.
She is known to have studied at Leeds College of Art (circa 1900-2 ) and at Keighley School of Art, where she became a pupil/teacher and won a Government Prize for her art work. She later also taught art at Drake and Tonson’s Grammar School, and at Keighley Girl’s’ Grammar School, parallel to her own work as a practising artist. She was also an active member of the Keighley Arts Club.
She painted mainly Yorkshire regional landscape scenes, but also visited Tarascon and other places of the Alpes-Côte d’Azur region of France to holiday and to paint.
Tarascon, France. Image: Bradford Libraries Service.
Annie participated in the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society exhibition in 1900 and also exhibited at the International Society of Sculptors, Painters & Gravers, and at Royal Academy shows (1929, 1932 & 1934); and with the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours.
She also exhibited a plaster frieze at the Leeds City Art Gallery Arts and Crafts Exhibition, 1900 (‘Frieze for Nursery’), and sculptural artwork at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (‘The Dancers’) at the Gallery’s 1902 Autumn exhibition of pictures and sculpture.
Canal at Kildwick. Image: Bradford Libraries Service.
Annie made a bequest in her will to the Royal Academy that money from her estate should be used by the Academy for the purchase of watercolours and drawings to be given to public art galleries in England – known as the Annie Hugill Bequest Fund