By Peter F. Stevens

At the corner of School and Washington Streets, a graceful manse with a white-picket fence set atop a classic New England stone wall offered a perfect setting for the home's owners, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Ball Hughes.

Ball Hughes, one of the most prominent sculptors of his day, had found inspiration and contentment alike in Dorchester.

Robert Ball Hughes was born in London on January 19, 1806, and "early evinced a taste and talent for molding [clay]."

In 1818, what seemed at first a burst of bad behavior heralded instead the first steps of a budding sculptor and artist: "His mother observed that the ends of wax candles constantly disappeared from the candlesticks; and indeed that sometimes whole ones were also missing. At length, on making some inquiry, it was found that our young genius Ball was the one who had thus robbed the old gilded candelabra of their wax ornaments.

"The next thing to be ascertained was why he did it; and, being pressed by his father to tell the truth and avoid a flogging, he confessed to taking them to enable him to copy in wax a picture which hung in the garret representing the Wisdom of Solomon."

When the youth showed his parents the wax bas-relief he had fashioned of the painting, they did not punish him. They promptly enrolled him in the studio of acclaimed sculptor Edward Hodges Bailey.

Ball Hughes soon became the studio's prize pupil, attracting attention in artistic circles over the following seven years. He racked up medals and awards in which he competed against men many years his senior. An admirer wrote: "These [the honors] were all obtained before he was of legal age."

As Hughes's work caught the attention of artists in Europe, Britain's nobility came knocking on his studio door. Still in his twenties, he was hired by the Royal Family to sculpt busts of the Duke of Sussex, the Duke of Cumberland, various countesses, and, most significantly, King George IV himself, who ordered the sculptor to cast the monarch's image in bronze.

In 1829 the flourishing young artist took a bride, a cultured socialite born near London and given an outstanding education,especially in music and art. To the surprise of London bluebloods, the couple left for the United States within days of their marriage. Ball Hughes had become so enamored of the idea of visiting the former "Colonies" after several chats with affluent friends that he decided he had to see the blossoming republic.

For several years he toured the Eastern U.S., and while visiting Boston in the 1830s, he took a jaunt out to Dorchester and fell immediately in love with its pastoral beauty. He bought a home on Adams Street directly opposite the tract of land that would become Cedar Grove Cemetery. Nearly every day, he strode from his home and across the way to the grassy field adorned with lofty stands of trees. He drew inspiration from a corner that was shaded by cedars,passing hours at a time there. He and his wife also found instant "celebrity status" in their new town: "Artists were not numerous in the country... and Mr. and Mrs. Hughes were the recipients of much attention."

In Dorchester, Mrs. Hughes literally brought the arts to local students, giving lessons in drawing and painting. She also took her talents "on the road." A friend of the couple noted: "No weather in which horses could travel from Adams Street, Dorchester, to Boston, however chilling those long omnibus rides might be, could deter her from meeting her scholars, many of whom became her lifelong friends. They learned from her more than the technique of the pencil and the brush; they learned thoroughness, exactitude, and unity."

One of the beneficiaries of those lessons was the couple's daughter.

Inspiration filled Hughes often in Dorchester, for he created statues of historical, literary, classical, and even whimsical figures that garnered nationwide attention and respect. His equestrian statues of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were hailed as masterworks of "the greatest possible credit." Art critics in the nation's newspapers lauded him as "possessing the highest order of genius."

In 1851, he and his wife moved to a mansion at the corner of School and Washington Streets. The handsome dwelling had been owned by owned by Captain Jeremiah Spalding, who had made his fortune in trade with the Far East. Now, the two artists turned the Ball Hughes mansion into a venue where some of the century's loftiest celebrities came to visit, people such as Charles Dickens. "Here," a Dorchester resident wrote, "the genial host and hostess entertained delightful circles of friends….The old house seemed imbued with the characteristics of its inmates, and everything was in perfect harmony."

No matter how many celebrities called on the couple, no matter how many soirees filled the mansion's drawing and dining rooms, the sculptor continued to find the time to create. As one admirer assessed, "the productions of Ball Hughes, the sculptor, were characteristic of the individuality of the artist himself - strong, faithful, original."

Ball Hughes died in 1868. He was buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery, among the cedrars from which he had drawn inspiration during his first years in Dorchester. His wife would join him in Cedar Grove in 1892.

Today, few remember 19th-century Dorchester's first couple of the arts, but in their day, the Ball Hughes Housetook an artistic backseat to no other private homes, not even those of Beacon Hill.