Whose work was said to have shown "splendid promise"?
Despite the grandeur of Florence, Etty was severely depressed, writing to his brother on 5 October that "I feel so lonely, it is impossible for me to be happy" and complaining of "the vermin in the bed, the dirt and the filth" which he considered "such as no Englishman can have any idea of, who has not witnessed it". His emotional state made it impossible for him to study, and within a month of his arrival in Italy, he began the journey back to England, stopping in Paris on 26 October 1816. There he enrolled in the atelier of Jean-Baptiste Regnault but found the atmosphere rowdy and the studio too full of Frenchmen, and he left after a week. While in Paris he also attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and amassed a large quantity of prints from the art shops of Paris. Still homesick, Etty left Paris, returning to London in November.Notwithstanding his unhappiness, Etty appears to have developed as a painter during his travels. For the first time, his two paintings exhibited at the 1817 Summer Exhibition (Bacchanalians: a Sketch and Cupid and Euphrosyne) attracted a favourable review in the press, in this case from William Paulet Carey writing in the Literary Gazette who considered Bacchanalians "a fine classical invention" and Cupid as showing "splendid promise". Carey was later to take great pride in being the first critic to recognise Etty's potential, and continued to champion him throughout his career. In 1818 Etty entered a copy of Damiano Mazza's The Rape of Ganymede—at the time thought to be by Titian—in one of the Royal Academy's painting competitions. Easily the most accomplished entry in the competition, Etty was due to win until two of the other contestants complained that he had technically breached RA rules by briefly removing the painting from Academy premises to work on it at home; they further complained that Etty was technically a professional artist and thus ineligible for the contest despite his still being a student. Etty was disqualified from the competition, but the high quality of his work further raised his prestige within the Academy. Although his income was still low and he was surviving on gifts from his brother, at some point by 1818 Etty hired an assistant, George Henry Franklin.
Etty