page_title: William Etty
section_title: Decline
hierarchical_section_title: William Etty / Later life (1836–1849) / Decline
caption_attribution_description: .
context_page_description: William Etty RA was an English artist best known for his history paintings containing nude figures. He was the first significant British painter of nudes and still lifes. Born in York, he left school at the age of 12 to become an apprentice printer in Hull. He completed his apprenticeship seven years later and moved to London, where in 1807 he joined the Royal Academy Schools. There he studied under Thomas Lawrence and trained by copying works by other artists. Etty earned respect at the Royal Academy of Arts for his ability to paint realistic flesh tones, but had little commercial or critical success in his first few years in London.
  Etty's Cleopatra's Arrival in Cilicia, painted in 1821, featured numerous nudes and was exhibited to great acclaim. Its success prompted several further depictions of historical scenes with nudes. All but one of the works he exhibited at the Royal Academy in the 1820s contained at least one nude figure, and he acquired a reputation for indecency. Despite this, he was commercially successful and critically acclaimed, and in 1828 was elected a Royal Academician, at the time the highest honour available to an artist.
context_section_description: After Sirens, Etty's output remained as high as ever, with seven paintings exhibited at the 1838 Summer Exhibition, but the quality of his work is generally considered to have gone into decline. By 1838 critics began to comment that Etty's paintings were no longer inventive but simply reworkings of his earlier paintings, while in June of that year William Makepeace Thackeray (under the pen name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh) wrote that "[Etty] is, like great men, lazy, or indifferent, perhaps, about public approbation". By 1839, criticisms of Etty were being raised in even those newspapers and journals which had previously championed his work. A new type of criticism of Etty also began to appear in 1839, from a new generation led by The Art Union, who praised Etty's technical abilities but saw his choice of subjects as out of touch and anachronistic, and "very frequently doing as little good for mankind as the priest who preaches his sermon in Latin".
  From around this time onwards, while Etty still held to his belief that the purpose of art is to illustrate moral lessons, he began to abandon the literary, religious and mythological themes which had dominated his work. He began to paint still lifes, beginning with Pheasant and Peach (likely to be the painting now called Dead Pheasant and Fruit); in the 1840s he exhibited six in total, and painted many more. Etty was the first English painter to paint significant still lifes, which at the time were thought by the English a primarily Netherlandish form. Also for the first time, he began to paint a significant number of landscape paintings. Etty still continued to paint history paintings, but while he continued to produce highly acclaimed reworkings of his previous pictures, those works on fresh topics were generally poorly received. Etty's decline in quality can possibly be attributed in part to London art dealers; from 1835 dealer Richard Colls had become increasingly close to Etty, and by 1844 had a near-monopoly on his work. As the importance of the landed gentry to the art market declined, the new purchasers of art were industrialists; generally lacking in a classical education and with little interest in Old Masters, they preferred to buy works by then-contemporary artists such as Etty, and relied on dealers to advise them.
  In May 1840, Etty made the trip to Brussels and Antwerp which he had been forced by revolution to abandon in 1830. He intended to study the works of Rubens, but the briefness of his tour—in the company of Betsy Etty he visited Ostend, Bruges, Antwerp, Brussels, Aachen, Cologne, Bonn and Rotterdam in the course of ten days—meant he had little time for study. The following year he returned to Antwerp and Mechelen for a longer visit to visit St. Rumbold's Cathedral and to study the substantial collections of Rubens paintings in the two cities. On this second journey he twice visited a Trappist monastery outside Antwerp, staying overnight on one visit, and bought a Trappist habit; he also bought a Capuchin habit from a monastery in Bruges. These acquisitions prompted paintings on monastic themes over subsequent years.
  Despite a perceived decline in his work's quality, the 1840s were the most financially successful of Etty's career. His income increased with further opportunities for patronage from a growing industrial class, and with few costs and all his earlier debts cleared, Etty was in a position to invest money for the first time. By 1841 Etty had around £300 invested, rising to £8500 in 1845 and £17,000 in 1849. He continued to have difficulty forming relationships with any woman other than Betsy Etty, writing in his diary in 1843 that "being in sound Mind and Body I declare it to be my Firm Intention NEVER TO MARRY. In which resolution I pray GOD to help me that I may devote myself purely to my Art, my Country, and my GOD!"
  In May 1843, Etty was one of eight artists chosen by Prince Albert to paint frescoes on the theme of Milton's Comus for a new pavilion being built in the grounds of Buckingham Palace. Etty was unhappy with his selection, as fresc
caption: Dead Pheasant and Fruit (c. 1839)
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