William Etty, R.A.

The present work is possibly a study related to a painting entitled The Backbiter, which Etty exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844 (no. 123), where it was hung in the favoured East Room of the Academy (then sharing premises with the National Gallery). Untraced since and its appearance unknown to scholarship, according to Alexander Gilchrist, Etty’s biographer, The Backbiter and ‘its companion’ Eve at the Fountain, also shown at the Academy that year though not in the same room, were ‘two lovely small specimens’. ¹ Both pictures were painted for Etty’s dealer, Richard Colls and the Illustrated London News, in its review of the 1844 RA exhibition, praised The Backbiter, which its critic identified as ‘apparently Eve and the Serpent’, as ‘a special piece of colouring’ . Though it remains untraced, it is likely the painting that was lent to the Liverpool Art Club’s exhibition entitled Loan Collection of Oil Paintings by British Artists born before 1801 in 1881 (no. 273), by the local collector Peter Stuart.

Richard Green has suggested that the present work is possibly more a mémoire of Etty’s 1844 The Backbiter, rather than a preparatory sketch for the painting. Previously it has been mistaken for the artist’s 1844 exhibition painting itself, however the small scale and free handling rule this out as a possibility, given what we know if its exhibition history and the verbal descriptions that survive.

We are grateful to Richard Green for his assistance with the cataloguing of this lot. 

^1. A. Gilchrist, Life of William Etty, R.A., vol. 2, London 1855, p. 373.

^2. Illustrated London News, 11 May 1844 (vol. 4, no. 106), p. 306.