Frazer, Hugh

by Linde Lunney

Frazer, Hugh (1793?–1880), artist, was from Dromore, Co. Down. His parents were probably Hugh and Agnes Frazer (née Dickson); Hugh Frazer senior may have been a solicitor, and the family was well-connected locally. Agnes Frazer's grandfather, Alexander Colville (d. 1777), was a notable non-subscribing presbyterian minister who defied synod to be installed in Dromore; more distant family connections included Charles Dickson (qv), John Martin (qv) and John Mitchel (qv). John Frazer (1825–84) from Dromore, a merchant and philanthropist in Sydney, Australia, may have been a relative. Nothing is known of Hugh Frazer's life until 1812, when he enrolled in the Dublin Society's drawing school, and then in 1813, exhibited a drawing with the Society of Artists in Dublin. In 1826 his work was exhibited in the RHA, and he became a member of the RHA in 1837; at that time he had been living and working in Belfast for some years. Frazer taught art privately there, until in 1838 he was elected professor of painting in the RHA. He held the post until 1853, and was concurrently librarian from 1845.

To judge by his writings and reviews of exhibitions in Belfast and Dublin newspapers, Frazer was acquainted with the prominent artists of the day, and probably taught a number of those who were later well-known. His own work is uneven; sometimes competent, but more often rather weak. He is however regarded as the earliest important landscape artist from Ulster, and his landscapes are of interest as a topographical record of places near Belfast and in the Lagan valley. Frazer painted some genre works; 'The faction fight' was one of eight paintings he exhibited in the RHA in 1838, and he is known to have painted portraits. One of his more ambitious works, a large canvas of 1826 depicting the battle of Clontarf, was on loan in the Casino, Marino, in 2014, to celebrate the battle's millennium. Despite his family background, Frazer was sometimes in considerable financial difficulty, and on occasion offered to raffle his works, but his enthusiasm for the pursuit of art seems to have continued. In 1825, as a young man, he published a slim Essay on painting, in which he urged that local textile workers should be educated in design and the science of colouring, 'to superadd an immense proportionate value to the raw material'.

Frazer was years ahead of his time in this suggestion, and also in his pleas in newspaper articles in the 1830s for the establishment in Belfast of an institute of fine arts, with facilities for education and exhibitions. In 1836 Frazer with colleagues including Andrew Nicholl (qv) started the Belfast Association of Artists, and was its first president, using his presidential address to urge his townsmen to support art and art education. The first exhibition of the association took place in 1836, and there were two exhibitions in subsequent years, but public support was not forthcoming and the initiative failed. In 1839 Frazer's altarpiece for the catholic chapel in Dromore was commended in a review in a catholic newspaper. In 1851 he gave a course of lectures in the Mechanics' Institute, Belfast, on the 'education of the eye', and ten years later, in 1861, he resigned from the RHA. Nothing is known of any marriage, and nothing of Frazer's later life, until his death in Dublin, aged 87, on 23 February 1880.