Hughson Hawley (1850–1936) was born in England, where his father was an actor and librarian of the Shakespeare Memorial at Stratford-upon-Avon. Self-taught as an artist, Hawley worked as a theatrical scene designer at London's Theatre Royal and later at Stratford-upon-Avon.
In 1879, on the instigation of the American dramatist Steele Mackaye of Madison Square Theater in New York, Hawley emigrated to America. He became a leading designer of theater backdrops in New York City. In 1880, the architects Francis H. Kimball and Thomas Wisedell, who had been commissioned to remodel the Madison Square Theater, encouraged Hawley to open an architectural rendering studio.
So followed a fifty-year career as the leading architectural renderer in New York, working from his studio in the Lincoln Building, 1 Union Square. He was employed by the city's most prominent architecture firms to produce drawings of proposed building designs, including creating perspectives for Cass Gilbert, Ernest Flagg, George B. Post, and Trowbridge & Livingston. This was an exciting time in American architecture, when the first skyscrapers were being constructed—and Hawley's coloured drawings helped translate technical plans into spectacular visions to capture the imagination. Hawley's drawings appeared in literary journals, newspapers, and mass-market magazines such as Harper’s Magazine.
Late in life Hughson Hawley returned to the UK. He died in 1936 at Patcham, Brighton, at the home of his daughter and son-in-law, the writer Jeffery Farnol.
