The frame dates from the late 17th century and is English in the Bolognese style.

William Etty was the most important early Victorian painter of the nude. He gained status and reputation by colossal history paintings. He also produced a large number of paintings of single female figures, most based on his work alongside the students in the Royal Academy life room, where he painted until the end of his working life.

He was born in 1787, seventh son of a York baker and confectioner. Despite early evidence of talent, his family circumstances meant that he had to be apprenticed to a Hull printer for seven years. When he completed his articles in 1805, he worked as a journeyman for only three weeks and went straight away to London where he became a student at the Royal Academy Schools in the following year. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution for the first time in 1811, subsequently showing regularly at both these exhibitions. By 1820 he was successful, with numerous commissions and employing an assistant. Academic honours soon followed. He was elected Associate of the Royal Academy in 1824, in 1825 exhibited his first huge history painting, The Combat (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), and in 1828 became a full Academician, beating John Constable in the vote. His fellow Academicians tried to dissuade him from continuing to paint in the life room, but he calmly ignored their protests, once offering to resign rather than comply. In the mid-1830's his health began to fail (he was asthmatic) and he began to produce larger numbers of small scale and single figure works, which he sold to art dealers and the new middle class patrons of art, in order to accumulate capital against the time when he could no longer paint. In 1848 he retired to York, where he died and is buried.

Foreign travel was an interesting feature of his career. His trips abroad were made to enlarge his knowledge of art, rather than to paint foreign scenes. He first went to France in 1815, when the end of the Napoleonic wars made tourism possible again. Another visit followed in 1816. On this occasion he went on to Florence and in Paris studied under Jean-Baptiste Regnault. His acquaintance with the French art world is demonstrated by his links with Delacroix, who visited him on his own journey to England in 1825. A further visit to Paris followed in 1830. His most extensive foreign tour took place between June 1822 and January 1824. He travelled as far as Naples and spent nine months in Venice. On this tour he made over 50 copies of old master paintings, concentrating on Titian and Rubens, renewing his acquaintance with the latter artist's works in brief trips to Holland and Belgium in 1840 and 1841. Etty's love for these two painters provided a vital inspiration for his work.

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. His sale in 1850 contained nearly eight hundred such products of his industry and enthusiasm: as Anderdon wrote: `This was a wonderful sale to see - Christies 2 Rooms encumbered by Millboards and Sketches of canvas each displaying forms of man and womankind - heaps.'(1) Many of these studies were later turned into pictures by the crude addition of backgrounds to make them more saleable. Gilchrist, Etty's first biographer, deplored the fact that so many had been `painted over by inferior men and hopelessly ruined'.(2) The present work retains its original indefinite background and the freshness of a direct study from the life.

William Holman Hunt left a vivid account of Etty, shortly before his retirement, 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. At this stage, he made the half tints by leaving the ground more or less to show through the scumblings. After each touch his weighty head overbalanced itself to right and left, while he drew himself back for a more distant glance. At every fresh sally he recommenced by enlarging the sweep of his brush on the palette. The next evening he began to clear away the excess of dried and undried paint with cuttle-fish, and encircled away again with colours differing only by the inclusion of yellows and the more delicate lakes... He was intoxicated with the delight of painting, and when, after a careful reloading of his brush, he drove the tool upwards in frequent bouts before his half closed eyes, I don't think that, had he been asked suddenly, he could have told his name.'(3)

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.'(4)


1. Dennis Farr, Etty, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1958), page 108
2. Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Etty, (David Bogue, London 1855), volume 2, page 309
3. William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, (Macmillan & Co., London 1905), volume 1, pages 94 - 95 with a reproduction of Hunt's drawing of Etty at work on page 94
4. Quoted Farr, op. cit., page 77