Hughes was born in Sydney in 1938. His father and paternal grandfather were prominent lawyers. Hughes's father, Geoffrey Forrest Hughes, was an aviator in World War I, with later careers as a solicitor and company director. Geoffrey Hughes died from lung cancer when Robert was aged 12. Robert Hughes's mother was Margaret Eyre Sealy, née Vidal. His older brother, Thomas Eyre Forrest Hughes, is an Australian lawyer and former Attorney-General of Australia.

He was educated at St Ignatius' College, Riverview before going on to study arts and then architecture at the University of Sydney. At university, Hughes associated with the Sydney "Push" — a group of artists, writers, intellectuals and drinkers. Among the group were Germaine Greer and Clive James. Hughes, an aspiring artist and poet, abandoned his university endeavours to become first a cartoonist and then an art critic for the Sydney periodical The Observer, edited by Donald Horne.[1] [2] Around this time he wrote a history of Australian painting, titled The Art of Australia, which is still considered to be an important work. It was published in 1966. Hughes was also briefly involved in the original Sydney version of Oz magazine, and wrote art criticism for The Nation and The Sunday Mirror.

In 1961, an article by a law student, Geoffrey Lehmann, in the Sydney University weekly newspaper Honi Soit noted similarities between specific Hughes poems (including two that had won the Henry Lawson Prize in 1957) and work by Terence Tiller, George Seferis, Alun Lewis and Dylan Thomas. Similarly, a published Hughes drawing was described as resembling one which had appeared in a 1955 international art magazine. The criticism was given wider prominence by the award-winning poet and journalist Elizabeth Riddell in a Daily Mirror article.

Hughes left Australia for Europe in 1964, living for a time in Italy before settling in London, England (1965) where he wrote for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Observer, among others, and contributed to the London version of Oz. In 1970 he obtained the position of art critic for TIME magazine and he moved to New York. He quickly established himself in the United States as an influential art critic.

In 1975, he and Don Brady provided the narration for the film Protected, a documentary showing what life was like for Indigenous Australians on Palm Island.

Hughes and Harold Hayes were recruited in 1978 to anchor the new ABC News (US) newsmagazine 20/20. His only broadcast, on June 6, 1978, proved so disastrous that, less than a week later, ABC News president Roone Arledge dumped Hughes and Hayes, replacing them with veteran TV host Hugh Downs.

In 1980, the BBC broadcast The Shock Of The New, Hughes's television series on the development of modern art since the Impressionists. It was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised.

In 1987, The Fatal Shore, Hughes's study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, became an international best-seller.

During the 1990s, Hughes was a prominent supporter of the Australian Republican Movement.

Hughes provided commentary on the work of artist Robert Crumb in parts of the 1994 film Crumb, calling Crumb "the American Breughel".

His 1997 television series American Visions reviewed the history of American art since the Revolution. He was again dismissive of much recent art; this time, sculptor Jeff Koons was subjected to criticism. Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore (2000) was a series musing on modern Australia and Hughes's relationship with it. During production, Hughes was involved in the near-fatal road accident detailed in the next section.

Hughes's 2002 documentary on the painter Francisco Goya, Goya: Crazy Like a Genius, was broadcast on the first night of the BBC's domestic digital service.

Hughes created a one hour update to The Shock of the New. Titled The New Shock of the New, the program aired first in 2004. [3]

Hughes published the first volume of his memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know, in 2006. [4]

On 28 May 1999, during a brief return to Australia, Hughes was seriously injured in a vehicle accident near Broome, Western Australia. After a day out fishing, Hughes had been driving alone when his hired Nissan Pulsar collided head-on with a Holden Commodore. Hughes's right leg was broken in five places and his right elbow was shattered. He was airlifted to Royal Perth Hospital, was in a coma for several weeks and later claimed no memory of the crash. Three men were travelling in the other car, one of whom was injured; they stated that Hughes was driving on the wrong side of the road.

During 2000, Hughes was acquitted of two counts of dangerous driving by Broome magistrate Antoine Bloemen. Hughes did not give evidence and his defence was technical, in that the prosecution could not rule out the possibility of a mechanical failure causing the car to veer over the centre line. However, the charges were reinstated and upgraded by the WA Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Robert Cock QC. Two men from the other vehicle were not called to give evidence, following allegations that they had attempted to blackmail Hughes. He was subsequently acquitted.

Hughes was later sued for defamation by Cock and his assistant, Lloyd Rayney. Further controversy arose when it was alleged that Hughes had made a racist remark about Rayney, an Asian Australian whose family hails from Aden in Yemen. This was denied by Hughes.

The matter came to a close in 2003, when the Western Australian Crown Solicitor's appeal against Hughes's acquittal reached court. This time Hughes pleaded guilty to the charge of dangerous driving causing grievous bodily harm. He was convicted and fined A$2,500.

Hughes married his first wife, Danne Patricia Emerson, in 1967 and was divorced in 1981. She died of a brain tumour in 2003 at the age of sixty.

Hughes and Emerson had one child, Danton (30 September 1967 - 2002), named after the French revolutionary, Georges Danton. Danton became a sculptor and lived in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. In 2002, at age 34, Danton Hughes took his own life by gassing himself with his car in the garage. Hughes later wrote: "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."

From 1981 until 1996 he was married to Victoria Hughes, née Whistler.

In 2001 Robert married American artist and former art director, Doris Downes, with whom he had been together for 10 years. She is 21 years his junior. He has two stepchildren from Downes's previous marriage, Freeborn Jewett IV and Fielder Jewett. They divide their time between a loft in New York City and a home in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

His niece Lucy Turnbull (his brother Tom's daughter), a former Lord Mayor of Sydney, is married to Australian businessman and politician Malcolm Turnbull, who in September 2008 became Leader of the Opposition in the Federal Parliament. Robert stayed with them for an extended period during his recovery from injuries in the 1999 car accident.

Hughes received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism in 1982 and 1985, given by the College Art Association of America.

• 1987 - named New York Public Library Literary Lion
• 1988 - named recipient of the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award.
• 1988 - W.H. Smith Literary Award for The Fatal Shore
• 1991 - Officer of the Order of Australia
• 1995 - granted an Honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Melbourne
• 1996 - elected to membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1997 - elected one of 40 "Living National Treasures" after a general vote conducted by the Australian media on behalf of the National Trust of Australia
• 2000 - London Sunday Times Writer of the Year (previous recipients of the award including Anthony Burgess, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, and Salman Rushdie)
• 2007 - New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for non-fiction for Things I Didn't Know: a Memoir
• 2009 - The Mona Lisa Curse - Winner of the 2009 Grierson Award for Best Documentary on the Arts, Oxford Film and Television for Channel 4, UK
• 2009 - International Emmy Award - Arts Programming, "The Mona Lisa Curse", Oxford Film and Television for Channel 4, UK