 Etty felt that the work illustrated the moral that women are not chattels, and were entitled to punish men who violated their rights. He made little effort to explain this to his audience, and thus Candaules appeared morally highly ambiguous, inviting the viewer to sympathise either with the sexually immoral Candaules, the murderous Nyssia or the voyeuristic Gyges. From the moment it was unveiled Candaules was condemned as a cynical mix of a distasteful narrative and pornographic images, and there was near-unanimous consensus that it was inappropriate for public exhibition. The piece remained controversial long after Etty's death; Alexander Gilchrist's overwhelmingly flattering 1855 biography of Etty described it as "almost the only instance among Etty's works, of an undeniably disagreeable, not to say objectionable subject", while as late as 2011 Sarah Burnage of the University of York wrote of Candaules that "it is perhaps hard to see the painting as anything but a deliberate attempt by the artist to shock and scandalise". Candaules was bought by wealthy collector Robert Vernon, who was in the process of building a major collection of British art and was to become one of Etty's most important customers.
