Studio: international art (85.1923)

ETTY’S PICTURES IN LORD LEVERHULME'S COLLECTION

his day an exceptional practice. He be-
lieved, however, in his simple way that he
was really an “ historical painter," that he was
actuated by nobly sentimental ideas. “ My
aim in all my great pictures," he wrote,
u has been to paint some great moral on the
heart. The Combat—the beauty of mercy ;
the three Judith pictures—patriotism, and
self-devotion to her country, her people,
and her God ; Benaiah, David's Chief Cap-
tain—valour ; Ulysses and the Syrens—the
importance of resisting sensual delights, or
a Homeric paraphrase on the 4 Wages of
Sin is Death/ " and so on. This, I confess,
is not the Etty that charms me with the
serenity and suavity of his art, nor is it the
Etty we see at Lord Leverhulme's. But in
this guise he is seen in some public gal-
leries, and when Theophile Gautier came
face to face with English painting in Lon-
don at the International Exhibition of
1862, we find him writing : 44 William Etty
is the English artist who most approxi-
mates to the historical painter, such as
we understand him, and as the Italian
masters conceived him." But the famous
French critic confessed that he preferred
to the larger pictures—“ vast machines "
he called them—the small mythological
paintings such as are reproduced here
from the collection at 44 The Hill," in
which, as he said, Etty had 44 contrived
to blend the pure Greek ideal and the
romantic English grace in charming pro-
portions. The author of 44 Mademoiselle
de Maupin," delighting in the English
painter's colour, found in one 44 delightful
picture " that the beautiful body of Venus
had 44 the fresh, lustrous whiteness of the
pearl, the divine flesh glistening like the
mica of Paros, recalling in no way the
coarse human carnations." Well, it is such
pictures, painted just for the joy of woman's
delicate subtleties and graces of form and
flesh, with but the slightest imaginative
effort to interpret the fable with any
dramatic or poetic significance, that are
the main components of this collection at
“ The Hill." a a 0 0 0

Here are Cupid and Psyche in an ex-
quisitely tender caress of their pure-
winged girl and boyhood floating on clouds
in an azure sky ; here is Venus, in a fair
landscape, with a delicious chubby Cupid
sportively dancing about her ; and again

and again here is Venus, with Cupid or
with Mars, or with both ; and here are
nymphs, reclining or seated, and a pensive
maiden, partially draped, sitting beside a
moonlit lake ; and girls bathing, singly or
in groups, in lakes or rocky pools, and the
Three Graces themselves, all posing chastely
in their lovely nudity, and all depending
for pictorial charm on their painter's con-
ventional elegances of composition and
draughtsmanship, and his subtle sympathy
of brush and palette with their flesh. Etty's
drawing was never masterly and subtly
suggestive as was Degas's when he painted
women bathing. In Etty's lovely bathers
we see no shiver of the flesh refreshed by
cold water, and awkwardness of the nude
being suddenly unclothed, as Mauclair has
aptly pointed out in the nude studies of
Degas ; for in painting nymphs and
borrowing from ancient mythology, Etty
did not attempt to escape the conventional.
Nor in his time would there have been any
toleration of the cynicismwithwhich,in Mr.
George Moore's words,44 Degas has again
rendered the nude an artistic possibility."

There was in Etty no cynicism, artistic
or otherwise : he simply could not have

THE BATHERS"
OIL PAINTING BY
WILLIAM ETTY, R.A.

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