Studio: international art (85.1923)

ETTY'S PICTURES IN LORD LEVERHULME'S COLLECTION

would be guessed from the mise en scene of
many of his pictures, even had we not his
own word for it : but we have his own
avowal too, of the ruling artistic passion
of his life, the passion for the female
form. So from his twentieth year, when
he entered the schools of the Royal
Academy as a poor student, to the last year
of his life, when as an eminent Royal
Academician he retired enfeebled to his
native York to enjoy for but a few months
the handsome competence his art had
earned for him, he remained an assiduous
student in the Life Class. When brother
Academicians attempted to dissuade him
from this practice, pointing out to him
that, with the full honours of the Royal
Academy upon him, it would be more con-
sistent with his dignity to desist from
painting among the students, his reply, as

report has it, was that he would sooner
resign his honours : so great, so intense
was his preoccupation with rendering with
pigment all the subtleties of tint and tex-
ture that the artistic eye could perceive in
human flesh, above all in woman's. He
was a student all his life, and his fame rests,
and will rest, on his excellence as a colour-
ist, inspired by the great Venetians, and in
turn influencing our own Pre-Raphaelites,
and his supremacy as a painter of the nude.
To that end all his study tended, and it was
as methodical as it was persistent. To the
Life School he would carry a carefully
prepared palette, with colours enough for
two hours' work, after which he would
return to his bachelor apartments in
Buckingham Street, Strand, to dispense
“ Tea and Bohemian Muffins " to a
favoured company of students. Here his

4

FEMALE FIGURE REPOSING.” OIL
PAINTING BY WILLIAM ETTY, R.A.