Hugh Sleeping

Elizabeth Murray · 1847

Medium

Watercolor with traces of white gouache over graphite on brown wove paper

Original size

25.9 × 17.6 cm (10 1/4 × 6 15/16 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

"Hugh Sleeping" captures the quiet vulnerability of a resting figure with a tenderness rarely achieved in formal portraiture — the warm brown wove paper lending the scene its sense of hushed, intimate stillness before a brushstroke is even laid. Elizabeth Murray was a British watercolorist who spent much of her career living in Spain and Gibraltar, developing a sharp eye for domestic life alongside her broader travel documentation. In this piece she works with characteristic restraint: transparent washes built over a careful graphite underdrawing, with sparing touches of white gouache to lift light from form. The toned paper ground is not merely a support — it functions as a ready-made mid-tone that unifies the composition and gives the sleeping figure a natural warmth no white sheet could offer. Murray spent years in southern Europe producing work that chronicled everyday intimacy with unusual directness for the period, and the Art Institute of Chicago holds this study as part of its permanent drawings collection — a recognition of how much weight a small, private work can carry. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Murray's layered washes and tonal delicacy into the richer medium of oil on canvas, honoring the original's mood of complete stillness while giving it the presence and permanence of a work made to be lived with.