103 Facts About William Etty

William Etty was an English artist best known for his history paintings containing nude figures.

William Etty was the first significant British painter of nudes and still lifes.

William Etty completed his apprenticeship seven years later and moved to London, where in 1807 he joined the Royal Academy Schools.

William Etty continued to paint both male and female nudes, which caused severe criticism and condemnation from some elements of the press.

An extremely shy man, William Etty rarely socialised and never married.

William Etty was prolific and commercially successful throughout the 1840s, but the quality of his work deteriorated throughout this period.

William Etty died in 1849, shortly after a major retrospective exhibition.

The family were strict Methodists and William Etty was raised as such, although he disliked the spartan appearance of the Methodist chapel and liked to attend his Anglican parish church or York Minster when able.

William Etty showed artistic promise from an early age, drawing in chalk on the wooden floor of his father's shop.

William Etty remained in Hull for a further three weeks as a journeyman printer.

William Etty moved to London "with a few pieces of chalk-crayons in colours", to stay with his older brother Walter in Lombard Street.

William Etty arrived in London on 23 November 1805, with the intention of gaining admission to the Royal Academy Schools.

Applicants to the Royal Academy Schools were expected to pass stringent ability tests, and on his arrival in London William Etty set about practising, drawing "from prints and from nature".

William Etty obtained a letter of introduction from Member of Parliament Richard Sharp to painter John Opie.

William Etty visited Opie with this letter, and showed him a drawing he had done from a cast of Cupid and Psyche.

Shortly after William Etty joined the RA, four major lectures on painting were delivered by John Opie in February and March 1807.

Under this arrangement William Etty did not receive formal tuition from Lawrence.

William Etty found the experience of copying Lawrence's work extremely frustrating, and in his own words "was ready to run away", but he persisted and eventually taught himself to copy Lawrence's work very closely.

Once he had completed his year with Lawrence, William Etty returned to the Royal Academy, drawing at the life class and copying other paintings, as well as undertaking commissions and doing occasional work for Lawrence to earn money.

William Etty was unsuccessful in all the Academy's competitions, and every painting he submitted for the Summer Exhibition was rejected.

William Etty was forced into an inconvenient transient lifestyle, moving from lodging to lodging.

In 1816, in the face of his continued lack of success, William Etty decided to spend a year in Italy to study the artworks held in the great Italian collections.

William Etty had made a brief visit to France in early 1815, but other than this had never been abroad.

The 28-year-old William Etty had fallen in love, and fretted about the difficulties a potential marriage would cause, and whether it would be right to travel to further his career even though it would mean taking his new wife to a foreign country.

William Etty landed in Dieppe, and made his way to Paris via Rouen.

Notwithstanding his unhappiness, William Etty appears to have developed as a painter during his travels.

Easily the most accomplished entry in the competition, William 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 William Etty was technically a professional artist and thus ineligible for the contest despite his still being a student.

William Etty was disqualified from the competition, but the high quality of his work further raised his prestige within the Academy.

At the 1820 Summer Exhibition, William Etty exhibited two paintings: Drunken Barnaby and The Coral Finder: Venus and her Youthful Satellites Arriving at the Isle of Paphos.

Drunken Barnaby is a scene of a drunken man being carried away from an inn while a barmaid looks on; the barmaid is shown as sturdily built, plump and rosy-cheeked, a style in which William Etty continued to paint women throughout his career.

William Etty had for some time been musing on the possibility of a painting of Cleopatra, and took the opportunity provided by Freeling to paint a picture of her based loosely on the composition of The Coral Finder.

The success of Cleopatra notwithstanding, William Etty remained a student at the RA and continued with a rigorous programme of study.

The Louvre was hosting an exhibition of modern French painting at the time, at which William Etty felt a great dislike for the quality of portraiture in France, but he was nonetheless greatly impressed by the permanent collections, in particular Rubens's Marie de' Medici cycle, elements of which he later reused in many of his own works.

William Etty met Antonio Canova, to whom he had been recommended by Lawrence, shortly before Canova's death.

Rome was at the time suffering badly from malaria, and after two weeks William Etty decided to leave for Naples.

On his return to Rome, William Etty toured the city's museums, making copies of various artworks, particularly those of the Venetian artists such as Titian and Veronese whom he so admired.

William Etty had long considered Venice his spiritual home and "the hope and idol of my professional life", and had often wondered why, given its artistic importance, so few English travellers visited the city.

William Etty fell into a routine of copying paintings in Venetian collections by day, and attending the life class of the Venetian Academy of Fine Arts by night, producing around 50 oil paintings in total as well as numerous pencil sketches.

William Etty was extremely impressed with the high quality of the Venetian Academy; the instructors in their turn were extremely impressed with the quality of Etty's work, in particular his flesh tones.

William Etty acquired the nickname of "Il Diavolo" owing to the high speed at which he was able to paint, and watching him at work became something of a spectacle in its own right; Gioachino Rossini, Ladislaus Pyrker and others came to watch him paint.

William Etty's contemporaries considered it among the finest copies ever made of a painting generally considered to be impossible to copy.

William Etty had intended to travel to England, but instead remained in Paris, to resume copying works in Paris galleries, collecting prints and buying a lay figure and around 200 paintbrushes, both of which the French made to a higher standard than English manufacturers.

William Etty decided to return to a theme for which he had created a sketch in 1820, that of the story of Pandora and in particular the passage in Hesiod in which the seasons crown her with a wreath.

William Etty had exhibited a sketch in 1820 on the same theme, and had already decided on the arrangement of the figures.

Betsy was unmarried and 14 years younger than William Etty, and became his housekeeper in 1824.

William Etty remained in his service for the rest of his life, and as he grew older William increasingly came to depend on her, suffering distress whenever they were apart and regularly writing to her in panic whenever he did not hear from her.

William Etty became his companion and acted as his assistant, alongside his official assistant George Franklin.

William Etty recorded in his diary in 1830 that "it is best I have not married because I have not noisy Children and can have nice Books, and Pictures etc".

William Etty suffered from extreme shyness throughout his life, and when compelled to attend dinner parties would often sit silent throughout, although he was popular with fellow artists and students.

William Etty rarely socialised, preferring to concentrate on his painting; when on one occasion it was suggested that he had little further need of training and need not continue attending classes, he indignantly replied that "it fills up a couple of hours in the evening, I should be at a loss how else to employ".

William Etty began to fear that Betsy would marry and leave his service, in 1835 going as far as to have her sign an affidavit that she would never leave him.

William Etty became deeply suspicious that Betsy was becoming too close to Charles, a suspicion intensified when Charles took her on a visit to Holland and the Rhine; Charles returned to Java in 1845.

In 1848, William Etty retired to York leaving Betsy alone in his London apartment; although aware that Betsy was considering marriage he was confident that he could persuade her to come to York and live with him in his retirement.

Highly unusually for a history painting at the time, William Etty did not base The Combat on an incident from literature, religion or history, but instead painted a scene entirely from his own imagination, based on an idea which had first occurred to him in 1821.

The Combat continued to be one of William Etty's best-regarded works, and formed the basis of a successful 1848 engraving by George Thomas Doo.

In February 1828, shortly before his 41st birthday, William Etty soundly defeated John Constable by 18 votes to five to become a full Royal Academician, at the time the highest honour available to an artist.

All but one of the 15 paintings William Etty exhibited at the Royal Academy in the 1820s had included at least one nude figure, and William Etty was acquiring a reputation for using respectable themes as a pretext for nudity.

William Etty refused to give up attendance, offering to resign rather than give up his studies, and the Academy grudgingly allowed him to continue to attend classes.

William Etty divided his time between the RA's own life classes and those at nearby St Martin's Lane.

William Etty usually painted on millboard, re-using the reverse for fresh paintings.

William Etty was devastated by the loss, and was one of those considered to replace Lawrence as President of the Royal Academy, although in the event he did not stand for election.

Possibly distracted by the death of Lawrence, William Etty submitted only three paintings to the Summer Exhibition that year.

William Etty felt that the work illustrated the moral that women are not chattels, and were entitled to punish men who violated their rights.

William Etty travelled via Brighton, arriving in Paris in early July 1830.

The works William Etty painted following his return began to show a departure in style from his previous efforts.

In 1832 William Etty returned to the theme of A Sketch from One of Gray's Odes, exhibited in 1822 to such disdain from the press.

The painting generated favourable comparisons to Michelangelo and Rubens, and Etty's early supporter William Carey considered it to be evidence of Etty's "redeeming grace and spirit".

At around this time William Etty began to receive many unsolicited letters from wealthy Old Etonian lawyer Thomas Myers.

In mid-1833 Etty began a portrait of the daughters of Charles Watkin Williams-Wynn, the long-serving Conservative Member of Parliament for Montgomeryshire, titled Preparing for a Fancy Dress Ball.

William Etty was then little-known for portraits, but had recently completed Elizabeth Potts, a portrait of the daughter of a family friend, which although poorly received by some critics was technically highly accomplished.

William Etty said at the time that he hoped his portrait of the Williams-Wynn children would be "one of my best".

In February 1834, William Etty became seriously ill, and was incapacitated for four months.

Weak and unable to concentrate, William Etty painted very little, and spent the next few months visiting friends and touring the sights of Yorkshire.

William Etty had recently developed an interest in collecting pieces of armour, and The Warrior Arming is a technically adept study of the effects of lights from multiple sources shining on polished armour.

William Etty was prominent in the effort to resist the redesign and to restore the building to its original state.

In 1828 William Etty had written to his mother expressing horror at the demolition proposals, but distracted by the need to complete Sleeping Nymph and Satyrs was unable to take any action himself.

In February 1832 William Etty began a campaign of writing to local York newspapers urging the preservation of the walls, and sending donations to various campaigns associated with their retention.

In 1838, William Etty started lobbying for the establishment of an art school in York.

William Etty proposed that the Hospitium of St Mary's Abbey be used for this purpose, with the lower floor becoming a museum of sculpture and the upper floor becoming a school and exhibition hall.

William Etty remained closely associated with Catholicism throughout his later life, and was one of the few non-Catholics to attend the 1838 opening of Augustus Pugin's chapel for St Mary's College, Oscott, at the time the most important Roman Catholic building in England.

Also in 1836 William Etty began work on The Sirens and Ulysses, which he considered among his greatest works, and which is his largest surviving painting.

William Etty made every effort to ensure realism in the picture, going as far as to visit mortuaries to sketch corpses in varying stages of decay to ensure the accuracy of the cadavers on the beach.

When William Etty completed Sirens in 1837, it was one of the main attractions at the 1837 Summer Exhibition, the first to be held in the Royal Academy's new building in Trafalgar Square.

William Etty had used a strong glue as a paint stabiliser which flaked when dry, and as soon as it was complete Sirens began to deteriorate.

From around this time onwards, while William 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.

William Etty began to paint still lifes, beginning with Pheasant and Peach ; in the 1840s he exhibited six in total, and painted many more.

William Etty was the first English painter to paint significant still lifes, which at the time were thought by the English a primarily Netherlandish form.

William 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.

In May 1840, William Etty made the trip to Brussels and Antwerp which he had been forced by revolution to abandon in 1830.

William Etty's 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.

In May 1843, William 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.

William Etty was unhappy with his selection, as fresco was a medium with which he had no experience, but reluctantly did so, choosing to paint on the theme of Circe and the Sirens Three.

William Etty found himself unable to retouch or alter his existing work, as any freshly applied paint would flake away from the existing paint layer, and the lunette shape of the panel left William Etty with a large empty space above the central figures.

Etty's fresco was deemed unsalvageable, and although he offered to paint a replacement on the theme of Hesperus he was rejected, and William Dyce was commissioned to paint a replacement fresco.

William Etty's composition is shown from the viewpoint of Damon; by so doing William Etty aimed to induce the same reactions in the viewer as Damon's dilemma as described by Thomson; that of whether to enjoy the spectacle despite knowing it to be inappropriate, or to follow the accepted morality of the time and look away, in what art historian Sarah Burnage has described as "a titillating moral test for spectators to both enjoy and overcome".

William Etty continued to paint and exhibit, but his retirement plans grew firmer.

William Etty continued to exhibit, sending seven paintings to that year's Summer Exhibition, but they drew little interest, although the lack of nudes was applauded by some reviewers.

William Etty agreed only on condition that all nine of his large works were included.

William Etty had planned for a burial in York Minster, but neglected to cover the necessary costs in his will.

William Etty 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.

William Etty 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.

Outside York, William Etty generally remained little-known, with the majority of those galleries holding his works, other than the Lady Lever Art Gallery, the Russell-Cotes Museum and Anglesey Abbey, tending to keep them in storage.