William Etty

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William Etty

William Etty (* 10. March 1787 in York ; † 13. November 1849 ) was an English painter of Romanticism , the especially for his nudes was known.

Life

Early years

William Etty was born in York in 1787, the son of a former miller who had made a little fortune as a baker in London with a spiced bread he had developed. At the age of eleven, William Etty moved out of his parents' home and began his drawing training. After seven years he moved to London to continue his education. With his uncle, who also worked as a painter, Etty began painting studies of nature and based on models, but also with the copies of older works in order to train his style. He showed a picture called Cupid and Psyche to the painter John Opie , who then proposed him to the Royal Academy of Arts .

Study and training

Female Nude in a landscape 1820

William Etty began studying painting at the Royal Academy of Arts around 1807 and was a student of John Flaxman and John Opie , among others . Especially Thomas Lawrence , with whom he worked for a year, had a strong influence. The study was financed by his uncle, and his classmates included several painters who later made it world famous, including David Wilkie , John Constable , Benjamin Robert Haydon and William Collins . Etty developed his own style very quickly, but it was not successful in the first few years. In 1811 his picture Telemachus rescuing Antiope was included in the Academy Gallery, but received little attention. He worked steadily on his style until 1816 and slowly got a name in the art scene. In order to expand his knowledge of art, Etty decided to go on a trip to Italy in 1816. From this, however, he returned after only three months without having come further into the country than Florence .

The Storm

In 1820 he was able to draw some attention to his work with the picture Coral-finder , which was exhibited in the Royal Academy, reinforced by Cleopatra's arrival in Cilicia the following year. From 1822 to 1824 he toured various European cities, including Paris , Florence , Rome and Venice . On the trip he copied works in the Louvre in Paris and in other museums, especially by Titian , Michelangelo , Raffael and Peter Paul Rubens, and made numerous studies with naked women, which would later become the main element of his historical pictures. He remained true to the Italian style, especially the Venetian, even later.

Years of success

Hero and Leander 1828

In 1824 Etty became an associate member of the Royal Academy, mainly because of the masterpiece Pandora Crowned by the Seasons , which his old teacher Lawrence bought from him. Shortly thereafter, Etty exhibited about 130 of his paintings in the Academy. In the following years he created one of his most famous pictures with The Combat . In 1828 he became a full member and from that point on he had steady and uninterrupted success with his pictures.

In 1830 he went on another trip, but only came to Paris, where the July Revolution was raging. From here he returned to England by the quickest route. For the next ten years he painted consistently successful pictures and was also an attentive teacher at the academy. In 1840 he traveled to the Netherlands to see the original Rubens masterpieces in exhibitions in churches and public museums. He traveled to France again in 1843 to collect impressions for his planned work Joan of Arc , which later became his most expensive work at 2500 British pounds.

In 1848 William Etty returned to his hometown to live for the rest of his life. In the summer of 1849, however, he still got the opportunity to arrange a solo exhibition at the Royal Society of Arts , where most of his pictures were exhibited. He died in York on November 13 of the same year.

gallery

  • act

  • Kandaules , King of Lydia, shows his naked wife to the hidden Gyges

  • Study of Pandora

  • Bacchante with tambourine

  • Cupid and Psyche

  • Mira

literature

  • Alexander Gilchrist: Life of William Etty, RA Volume 1. David Bogue, London 1855 ( digitized version ).

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Etty, William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English Romantic painter, nude painter
DATE OF BIRTH March 10, 1787
PLACE OF BIRTH York
DATE OF DEATH November 13, 1849
Place of death York