WILLIAM ETTY, R.A. | RECLINING FEMALE NUDE IN AN INTERIOR

Urban Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Baron Fairhaven (1896–1966), Angelsey Abbey;

From whom acquired by the father of the current owner, by 1950s, and thence by descent.

Huttleston Broughton, 1st Baron Fairhaven (1896–1966), a noted British racehorse breeder and art collector, was one of the most important collectors of Etty’s work. He assembled a substantial group of paintings by the artist at Anglesey Abbey, his home near Cambridge. He subsequently bequeathed the house and its contents to the National Trust in 1966. 

Etty commented of his own work that 'finding God's most glorious work to be Woman, that all human beauty had been concentrated in her, I resolved to dedicate myself to painting – not the Draper's or Milliner's work – but God's more glorious work, more finely than ever had been done.’ No other artist in British history has dedicated themselves to the depiction of the human form as assiduously as William Etty, particularly the female nude, and this exceptionally well-preserved life study beautifully demonstrates the artist's skill at rendering flesh tints and capturing the human form. 

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’. In the cramped space of the Royal Academy schools senior academicians and students alike were able to look about them and see on one side ‘an Academician making a drawing in black-lead pencil or red chalk, with all the minuteness of finish’ and on the other ‘a member of the same body dabbing in with a palette, knife, and a pencil’ to create the ‘most gorgeous effects’.

Contemporary critics marvelled at the ‘languid and luxuriant’ beauty of Etty's nudes and, in reviewing the 1849 solo exhibition of his work held at the Society of Arts, the correspondent for the Literary Gazette described Etty as the ‘greatest artist that ever adorned the English school.' Alfred Elmore (1815–1881), a fellow British history painter, writing to the collector Thomas Miller, described Etty as ‘on a par with the best painters that ever lived’.

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