Henry Scott Tuke

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Henry Scott Tuke

Henry Scott Tuke RA (born June 12, 1858 in York , † March 13, 1929 in Falmouth ) was a British painter who is best known for his pictures of naked boys, which earned him the role of a pioneer in the field of homosexual culture Has.

Life

Tuke was born into a prominent Quaker family. His father Daniel Hack Tuke (1827–1895) was a well-known proponent of humane treatment of the insane. His great-great-grandfather William Tuke founded the first modern asylum in York in 1792 . His great-grandfather Henry Tuke , his grandfather Samuel Tuke and his uncle James Hack Tuke were also well-known social activists.

In 1874 Tuke moved with his family to London and enrolled at the Slade School of Art , where he met Thomas Cooper Gotch . After graduating, he traveled to Italy in 1880 . From 1881 to 1883 he lived in Paris , where he studied with the French history painter Jean-Paul Laurens and met the American painter John Singer Sargent , who also painted male nudes, although this was hardly known during his lifetime.

In the 1880s, Tuke also met Oscar Wilde and other well-known writers, most of whom were homosexual (mostly called Uranians at the time ) and who extolled male adolescents in their works. He wrote a "Sonnet to the Young" published anonymously in The Artist and also wrote an essay for The Studio .

Henry Scott Tuke: August Blue , 1893

Tuke returned to the UK and moved to Newlyn , a fishing village in Cornwall , where he joined a small colony of painters. Among them were Walter Langley , Albert Chevallier Tayler and Thomas Cooper Gotch , with whom Tuke now became a lifelong friend. These painters and a few others are known to be representatives of the Newlyn School .

In 1885 Tuke settled in Falmouth , which at that time was still remote in a rustic landscape. He bought a fishing boat for 40 pounds and converted it into a floating studio with living quarters. There he could pursue his passion of painting boys in peace. Most of his pictures depict boys and young men swimming and lazing, mostly naked on a boat or on the beach.

Tuke also produced more salable work on literary or historical subjects. In these pictures, Tuke placed his male nudes in a secure mythological context. Critics found these works mostly formal, lifeless, and weak.

Henry Scott Tuke: Ruby, gold and malachite , 1902

In the 1890s, Tuke abandoned the mythological subjects and began painting local boys fishing, sailing, swimming and diving in a more naturalistic style. He painted more freely and from then on used strong and fresh colors. One of the most famous paintings from this period is August Blue (1893–1894), a study of four naked young people who are bathing in the sea from a boat.

While Tuke's images of naked teens undoubtedly appealed to gay men who adolescents found attractive, they are never explicitly sexual in nature. The genitals of the models are almost never shown, they almost never touch and in no picture is there even a hint of open sexuality .

Tuke became close friends with many of his models, but it was never known whether he had sexual relations with them, whether for mutual love or for payment. While it is possible that he was sexually active with local youth, which would have been a criminal offense in the UK , it is also possible that he - like many gay men of the time - sublimated his sexuality into romantic friendships .

Henry Scott Tuke: The Bathers

Because of the subject of his pictures, Tuke was only able to sell a few of them, and only to a select group of homosexual art collectors. However, he was also a well-known portrait painter and kept a studio in London to do commissioned work there. Among his best known portraits is that of the soldier and author TE Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia").

Technically, Tuke preferred coarse and visible brush strokes at a time when a polished finish was favored by hip painters and critics. He had a keen sense of color and was a master at staging natural light, especially the soft, fragile sunlight of the English summer. If his subject had been more conventional, Tuke might have become a better known name in British painting. But as it was, he remained a niche painter.

However, Tuke enjoyed a considerable reputation and his painting enabled him to travel abroad, where he painted in France , Italy and the West Indies . In 1900 a banquet was held in his honor at the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society . He spent the last years of his life in poor health.

After Tuke's death, his reputation initially waned, and he was more or less forgotten until the 1970s, when he was rediscovered by the first generation of openly gay artists and collectors. Richly designed editions of his paintings were published and his works fetched high prices at auctions.

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personal data
SURNAME Tuke, Henry Scott
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British painter
DATE OF BIRTH June 12, 1858
PLACE OF BIRTH York
DATE OF DEATH March 13, 1929
Place of death Falmouth, Cornwall