What is the first name of the person who neglected to cover the necessary costs of his burial in his will?
Etty had planned for a burial in York Minster, but neglected to cover the necessary costs in his will. With Yorkshire local government in political and financial chaos in the wake of the bankruptcy of George Hudson, there was no political will to organise a public subscription or to waive the fees, and as a consequence Etty was buried in the churchyard of St Olave's Church, his local parish church. On 6 May 1850 the contents of his studio were auctioned, in a total of 1034 lots including around 900 paintings; some of these paintings were incomplete studies later completed by other artists to increase their value. In the years following his death Etty's work became highly collectable, his works fetching huge sums on resale. He continued to be regarded as a pornographer by some, with Charles Robert Leslie observing in 1850 "It cannot be doubted that the voluptuous treatment of his subjects, in very many instances, recommended them more powerfully than their admirable art; while we may fully believe that he himself, thinking and meaning no evil, was not aware of the manner in which his works were regarded by grosser minds".Six months after William's death, Betsy Etty married chemist Stephen Binnington, a distant relation of the Etty family. She moved into his house in Haymarket, and some time after his death moved to 40 Edwardes Square, where she died in 1888 at the age of 87.
While Etty did have admirers, the patchy quality of his later work meant that he never acquired the circle of imitators and students that could have led to him being seen as the founder of the English realist movement, now considered to have begun in 1848 with the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, two of the three founders of the Pre-Raphaelites, were heavily influenced by Etty's early works but recoiled from his later style. Holman Hunt recollected that "in my youth [Etty] had lost the robustness he once had [...] the paintings of his advanced age cloyed the taste by their sweetness". Millais had consciously modelled his style on Etty, and his works prior to the formation of the Pre-Raphaelites are very similar in composition, but after 1848 the only similarity in style is the use of colour. As Pre-Raphaelitism waned Millais's style became more varied, and some of his later work such as The Knight Errant owes a strong debt to Etty's influence.
William