Herbert F. West collection of A. Hugh Fisher

Alfred Hugh Fisher, a painter, printmaker, photographer, illustrator, poet, essayist, and critic known professionally as A. Hugh Fisher and to his friends as Hugh, was born in the Brixton district of London on February 8, 1867, the son of Alfred George Fisher and Isabella Read Smith Fisher. After some schooling he obtained a position as a junior clerk at George Street & Company, an advertising agency, in 1884. As a youth Fisher had declared his intent to become an artist; he exhibited his first watercolor at the Royal Academy in 1887, and in the 1880s began his career as an illustrator for a variety of popular periodicals. He received formal art education through a scholarship awarded him by the National Art Training School (now the Royal College of Art) from 1894 to 1897, after which he studied for six months with Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian in Paris. Beginning in 1901, Fisher traveled and worked in Europe and England, painting and drawing as well as turning out illustrations for publishers, particularly the Illustrated London News. In 1907 he was appointed to the position of artist for the British Colonial Office's Visual Instruction Committee (COVIC) under the direction of Halford Mackinder. The agency's intention was to create a series of lectures that would acquaint British children with their empire's varied geography, and Fisher was assigned to visit as many colonial possessions as he could within three years, to paint and photograph scenes to be turned into lantern slides to illustrate Mackinder's talks. His travels took him through Ceylon, India, and Burma (1907), Aden, Somaliland, Cyprus, Canada, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore (1908), Borneo, Gibraltar, Malta, and Australia (1909), and Tasmania, New Zealand, Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji (1910). In addition, a steamship accident in 1909 allowed him to spend a few days in Japan. Aside from the thousands of images he made for the committee, Fisher's journey resulted in his own volumes Through India and Burmah with Pen and Brush (1911) and India (1913). Throughout the 1920s and 1930s he regularly spent time in France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany. His friendship with the Hungarian etcher Gyula (Julius) Komjati (1894-1958), who was working in England in 1927, led Fisher to spend three months in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1932.

Fisher began producing etchings in the 1890s, and was elected to membership in the Royal Society of Painters and Etchers in 1898. He was also the author of The Cathedral Church of Hereford (1898), a few volumes of poetry, a novel titled Quix (1931), and many essays, obituaries, and book reviews, the latter also published under his pseudonym Caleb Reade. In 1909 Fisher married his second wife, Lilias Cecile Wyman (1875-1930), whom he had met at the offices of the Illustrated London News. He died on July 2, 1945, after having suffered a stroke, and was buried in North Curry, Somerset, England.

Herbert F. West, teacher, author, publisher, and Anglophile, taught comparative literature at Dartmouth College from 1925 to 1964, and was professor emeritus until his death. He received degrees from Dartmouth College and Harvard University, and founded Westholm Publications, which issued several titles between 1955 and 1972.