Single figure paintings on millboard of this type are usually the products of Etty’s work in the Life Room of the Royal Academy Schools, where he painted for two hours every evening for nearly forty years.
William Holman Hunt left a vivid account of Etty at work in the Life Room where he continued to paint even though he was so ill that he could scarcely mount the stairs. Although this account dates from a period some twenty years after the production of the present work, it is both revealing about Etty’s technical methods and about the passion with which this shy and pious bachelor painted the nude.
‘He painted on a sized but unprimed mill-board; he made the outline hastily with charcoal, dusted this out slightly, then took out his prepared palette and fastened it with a screw to the left hand upper end of his board. His colours were set in order from white through reds, browns, blues and greens to black. He began using them rubbing in the darks with umber and rich browns, and then painted on the general lights in masses with accentuated prominences of pure white, tempering this gradually from patches of blanched reds and lakes kept in squares of different strengths on his prepared palette’. (1)
Etty’s enjoyment of painting communicates directly to his audience in these free studies. In March 1837, at the last meeting of the Life School at Somerset House, Etty presented a life study to Constable, who had become his friend after they were no longer rivals for academic honours. ‘“You might eat it,” Constable is said to have remarked, smacking his lips.’(2)


1. William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Macmillan & Co., London 1905, pages 94
2. Quoted Farr, op. cit., page 77