William Etty, R.A. 1787-1849

Purchased from the artist for £350 by John Rushout, Lord Northwick;
Joseph Gillott, by whom acquired from the dealer Pennell, October 1846;
Gillott sale, Christie's, 27th April 1872, lot 263, bt. Baron Albert Grant for 1,000 gns.;
Baron Albert Grant sale, Christie's, 28th April 1877, lot 177, bt. John Rhodes for 710 gns.;
Mrs. J.R. Freeman, Hove (1930);
Colonel Fairfax Rhodes, sold Sotheby's, 11th July 1934, lot 44, by. Cooling for £90;
Anon. sale, 24th July 1936, lot 135, bt. Vicars for 36 gns;
Anon. sale, Christie's, 24th June 1949, lot 150, bt. Jeales for 45 gns.;
J. Leger & Son (until March 1955);
I. Oscar Herner

Royal Academy, 1839, no. 241;
Birmingham Society of Artists, 1847, no. 56 (lent by Joseph Gillott);
Dublin, Industrial and Fine Art, 1853;
Royal Academy, Old Masters, 1853, no. 42;
York, Yorkshire Fine Art and Industrial, 1879, no. 114;
Guildhall, 1892, no. 101;
Royal Academy, Old Masters, 1894, no. 14;
York, Royal Yorkshire Jubilee, 1897

Letter from Etty to Henry Howard, R.A., 9th April 1839 (In Thomas H. Etty Collection);
William Etty, R.A., Autobiography, published in The Art Journal, XI, 1849, pp. 13, 37-40. this was in the form of a letter to a cousin, John Clark, dated 28th October 1848, p. 40;
Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Etty, R.A. 1855, Volume II, pp. 28-9, 96-9, 338;
Waagen, Treasures of Art, 1857, iv, p. 403;
Dennis Farr, William Etty, 1958, pp. 85, 87,152, no. 80, plate 64

This monumental work by Etty can justly be considered his masterpiece.  In terms of sheer grandeur of composition it is unsurpassed in his oeuvre, and it passed through the hands of some of the most illustrious collectors of the nineteenth century.

Until 1846 this magnificent work hung in the collection of John Rushout, 2^nd Baron Northwick.  Northwick collected art voraciously and in later life he remarked that he had developed ‘an unbounded admiration for the works of the most refined art in painting, sculpture and architecture, with which [Rome] then abounded…These were the seductive amusements of my youth; they have clung to me through a long life, and they are now the solace of my old age’ (Quoted in John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800, 1997, p.830).  His collection became so extensive that in 1832 he built a special picture gallery at Northwick Park.  He later acquired Thirlestaine House in Cheltenham which also had a picture gallery, the guide to which in 1846 listed over 500 pictures.  Robert Huskisson painted an interior view of the picture gallery at Thirlestaine House (see fig. 1) in which the present work hangs proudly over the central door, flanked on its left by The Wood nymph’s Hymn to the Rising Sun by Francis Danby (Tate Gallery), below the famous portrait of Pope Paul III by Titian. 

The present picture passed from the hands of Lord Northwick to Joseph Gillott.  Gillott was a shrewd businessman who amassed a remarkable collection of paintings.  On his death the painting was acquired by Baron Albert Grant, a financial speculator whose fortune was equal to the building of the grandest private residence in London at the time, Kensington House. 

At the Royal Academy exhibition in 1839 Pluto Carrying off Proserpine was accompanied by some lines taken from John Milton’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses…

“That fair field of Enna where Proserpine
Gathering flowers, herself a fairer flower,
By gloomy Dis was gathered.”

Pluto Carrying off Proserpine was a popular mythological subject and one which had been in Etty’s mind for some years.  Early in 1835 he had written to the dealer Colls; “There is a subject I hope to paint, before I am much older…It is one I have often thought on, lately indeed, composed en groupe: Pluto carrying off Proserpine” (Farr, Op.Cit., p.85).  Etty went on to remark that this composition offered “beauty, action, masculine vigour; - landscape, sky, motion, agitation, flowers, and freshness; - the consternation of her attendant Nymphs scattering flowers in their fear and flight; matter enough to make a fine picture” (Ibid).  He made a number of studies of the anatomy of horses, and in January 1839 set about drawing the outline of the composition in charcoal.  He finally exhibited the work at the end of the month.  In the same exhibition Etty exhibited another classical subject, Diana and Endymion (no. 195), but no work by the artist was ever seriously to rival what Etty clearly thought was his masterpiece.