William Etty, R.A.

The life room of the Royal Academy, housed at Somerset House in The Strand and from early 1837 in premises shared with the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, played a central role in Etty’s artistic practice. Throughout his career (and long after he was a student) the artist was a regular attender, painting many nude studies usually on millboard. These provided a vast store of images for potential use in his large exhibition pieces, while certain studies were elaborated into complete, saleable pictures in their own right by the addition of invented backgrounds and accessories. The present work, on millboard, is in origin a life-room study of a model under strong artificial, overhead lighting, including a posing block to the right and an hourglass in the centre foreground. Typical of such studies is the way Etty allows the figure to be cropped by the edges of the support. To his life-room image Etty has added, in this instance, an imagined and evocative background of a sunset sky yielding to night, with a rising moon glimpsed between clouds.

The hourglass was an essential tool in the life room, used to time the length of posing sessions. It appears in other painted nude studies by Etty, examples being the so-called Despair and the Study of a Male Nude holding a Cross, which were lent anonymously to York Art Gallery’s exhibition William Etty: Art & Controversy of 2011-12 (nos. 76 and 79, both illustrated in the catalogue). Traditionally, hourglasses have featured in pictorial art for symbolic purposes, principally marking the passage of time and (in vanitas images) the transience of life. The Study of a Male Nude holding a Cross was inscribed within the painting by Etty to record what was for him the sad closure of the life room at Somerset House and it is likely that his inclusion of the hourglass alluded to the passing of much happy time there. However, whether or not the hourglass which features so prominently in the present work held any specific meaning for the artist is open to conjecture.

The pose of the figure, reaching down, is unusual for Etty and indeed would have being a difficult one for the model to sustain for any great length of time. The composition has certain similarities with that of a Male Nude by Etty sold in Philadelphia, Freeman’s, 18 June 2013, lot 98.

We are grateful to Richard Green for his assistance with the cataloguing of this lot and for endorsing the attribution from photographs.