WILLIAM ETTY, R.A. | ARIADNE

This painting originated as a double-sided life-room study, almost certainly made at the Royal Academy. The model for Ariadne adopts a pose typical of the life-room, and both she and her counterpart on the other side are illuminated by strong overhead lighting as used at the Academy. Etty favoured the versatility of millboard for such studies and it was not unusual for him to paint on both sides. The artist’s posthumous studio sale held at Christie’s in May 1850, included around 500 life studies on millboard, of which over 50 were catalogued as having sketches on both sides.

In this example, Etty has taken the composition on one side further with the addition of a dramatic setting in the form of a rocky coast at sunset to create a specific subject; Ariadne abandoned by Theseus on the island of Naxos, a classic of Greek mythology. Even on the reverse Etty has begun to elaborate on the life-room setting, tentatively converting a posing block into a fountain with water issuing from a lion-head spout.

The high finish of the figure of Ariadne is an excellent example of the ‘lustre, beauty and fleshliness’ which, in his own words, the artist sought to convey in his depictions of the human form and was so admired by his contemporaries, who marvelled at the depth and corporeality of his figures. A prominent figure at both the St Martin’s Lane and Royal Academy drawing schools, Etty remained devoted to the life class throughout his career, attending sessions long after his official artistic training had finished and even when his deteriorating health made it inadvisable. Contrary to the hieratic structure of most late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artistic training, the life class, as well as giving students the ability to study directly from the human form, encouraged an egalitarian sense of camaraderie, offering the opportunity for ‘contact and collision’ between artists, which Etty claimed resulted in ‘electric sparks and fire’.

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