'And see how many of the frolicking nudes are being watched by menacing satyrs, or have darkness looming in the background.' 'Look at the titles – for example The Destruction of the Temple of Vice,' said Laura Turner, curator of York Art Gallery, which has mounted the exhibition with help from the Paul Mellon centre for studies in British art and York University. Recesses feature in almost all Etty's major works, but their purpose was entirely misunderstood, according to new scholarship behind the exhibition and an accompanying book, William Etty – Art and Controversy.Īlthough some modern critics detect 'nipple eroticism' and penetrative sex in the artist's preparatory male studies, made at life drawing classes, which he attended until his death aged 62, his final compositions were archetypes of Victorian moral beliefs. The Morning Chronicle in 1833 demanded that the distinguished Royal Academy should choose 'a purer channel, and not persist, with an unhallowed fancy, to pursue Nature to her holy recesses'. 'No decent family can hang such sights on their walls,' said a typical sally in the London Examiner newspaper, lamenting 'another indulgence of what we had hoped was a classical, but are now convinced is a lascivious mind'. He beat Constable to election as a Royal Academician and won royal portrait commissions, but lost standing by ignoring demands for more modesty on his figures than wisps of muslin or strategically-placed clumps of grass.

Sarah Burnage, one of a trio of art historians behind the project, said: 'We aim to drag Etty's art from the doldrums of historical obscurity and give the world a fresh chance to study his truly remarkable work.'Ī high-minded bachelor whose private life has defied all attempts to unearth smut, Etty was acclaimed in his day but eventually sidelined because of his defiance of moralising, often hypocritical, critics. The biggest exhibition of his work since the 1950s, the six-month show is the flagship of an Etty revival which follows three years of intensive research into his life and obsessive reworking of male and female nudes.

William Etty by Sarah Burnage