Danton Hughes

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Danton Hughes (30 September 1967 - 2002) was an Australian sculptor and the son of art critic Robert Hughes and his first wife, poet Danne Hughes (née Emerson). He was names after the French revolutionary, Georges Danton.

[edit] Life

Danton was an aspiring artist who lived in Sydney's Blue Mountains with fashion designer, Jenny Kee (21 years his senior). They first met in London when Jenny was the baby-sitter to the then three-year old child, Danton. [[1]]

[edit] Death

Danton committed suicide in his home at the age of thirty-four. He gassed himself with his car in the garage. As eulogised by his father Robert, "He was very sad, he was very alienated, a condition for which I partly blame myself, as parents always do and must, I suppose, but bad things happened to him that he genuinely wasn't able to handle and that's all I can say about it." More recently Hughes has written: "I miss Danton and always will, although we had been miserably estranged for years and the pain of his loss has been somewhat blunted by the passage of time." A short time after Danton's death his often estranged mother, Danne Hughes, returned to Australia. She died of a brain tumour in 2003.