Henry Scott Tuke

"At the first time I took up the subject... it seemed to open up fresh vistas and certainly gave new interest to the study of the undraped figure to depict it with pure daylight upon it, instead of the artificial light of the studio. Besides as a matter of personal taste, I much prefer working in the open to the close air of a room."

"But I always return to my first opinion, that the truth and beauty of flesh in sunlight by the sea, is offered to you in a way impossible to secure in pictures built up from hasty sketches, at leisure, in one's studio. Because however much you may work indoors afterwards, whatever you add is with the outdoor impression upon you."

"Although he had a wide repertoire as an artist, not least in the many portraits and marine paintings he produced, Henry Scott Tuke is principally associated with the many paintings of the male nude he made. The nudes, images of boys and youths at the coast, bathing and basking, were the works that cemented his fame and his own reputation in his lifetime. Much admired by critics, and with an extensive roster of patrons and collectors, Tuke exhibited these works nationally and internationally, with many purchased by or gifted to municipal art galleries in the United Kingdom, in Europe, and as far afield as Australia."

"While twenty-first century eyes are more likely to view them with suspicion, as covertly sexual, the success and popularity of these works makes it clear that the bathing boy or youth was a completely legitimate genre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and many such paintings adorned the walls of exhibitions, galleries and homes not only in Britain but through Europe and beyond. For most artists and viewers this motif was about health, vigour and charm, a depiction of a childhood far from the evils and social problems of modern city life. Thus, the subject was innocent of any sexual interest; indeed, these works would have been seen as the very antithesis of the erotic."

"Famously, the models all said in later life that Tuke never exploited them or made untoward suggestions; unlike his friend Charles Masson Fox, Tyke was never accused of sexual impropriety in his relations with boys and young men."

"As one Tatler critic recognised when praising Henry Scott Tuke as par excellence the painter of youth', the depiction of naked youths bathing or sitting on Cornish beaches looking contemplatively out to sea played an important part in Tuke's artistic success. However, these paintings elicted a range of different readings and conflicting interpretations from Tuke's viewers, some of which detected a sexualized approach on the artist's part to the unclothed adolescent male body, while many others did not."

"By examining the physical attributes, poses and symbolisms of the naked youths that modelled for Tuke and were depicted in his key works, I argue that certain iconographic differences and pictoral correspondences were familiar to some of Tuke's viewers. This would have been due to their knowledge of classical precedents for representing the youthful male nude and through their exposure to erotic photographic images of naked youths in the open air that encouraged them to infer sexual intent. Yet for other audience, these sexualised associations remained elusive, as they approached the subject of youthful male nudes in landscape settings differently through the conventions of English pastoralism or by seeing the work as making reference to an updated visual language of neoclassicism gaining currency and critical support in British art from the 1860s onwards."

"Tuke's evocative compositions use naked or semi-dressed adolescent youths in Cornish coastal settings in order to update earlier naturalistic conventions, through their adoption of a progressive plein air Impressionist colouring and radical painterly handling. Tuke's paintings also modernise the conventions of the English male nude through their updated pictorial classicism and their use of Hellenistic sources that were currency in contemporary literature, art and photography. As Michael Matt examines in Chapter 6, these all-male subjects and their intimate approach to the masculine body encouraged some of Tuke's Uranian friends and admirers to make informed assumptions about his sexual proclivities and to see the works featuring nude male adolescents as signalling homoerotic intentions in his art."

"However, other audiences encountering these works at the Royal Academy or in artists' shows, museums and commercial galleries saw Tuke's paintings with their sensually appealing surfaces, heightened chromatism and delicate handling as suggestive and evocative, but not illicit or sexually provocative. Consequently, they did not question Tuke's reasons for painting naked male adolescents bathing or sitting on the Cornish seashore or at sea. Nor did they see the manner in which male nudes were painted and the fascination with the sensual effects of sunlight on youthful pale flesh as anything other than a licit engagement on the artist's part with a legitimate modern subject. Moreover, as audiences for modern art expanded in the latter part of the nineteenth century, making the most of the greater opportunities in exhibitions, art galleries and museums to see it first hand, so the volume of biographical literature and critical writing on artists' lives exploded and press interviews with living artists offered new ways of evaluating not only their approaches and intentions, but their lifestyles and public images."

"Tuke's interview [in 1895 with The Studio magazine] weaves together many strands of his artistic and aesthetic credo: a commitment to working en plein air in front of the model posed in nature, his dedication to painting by the seaside away from the confinement of the studio, and his resolve to retain 'the outdoor impression' even when working afterwards in the studio. Since Tuke specialised in depicting male nudes, most often adolescents alone or in groups outdoors, The Studio interviewer, like its readers, was particularly interested in the exact nature of Tuke's fascination with naked young boys depicted swimming, sailing or on Cornish beaches, and his attraction to the sensual effect of light on young flesh- questions that Tuke tactfully avoided."

"Henry Scott Tuke was born into one of the great Quaker dynasties of Britain. The names of Cadbury, Rowntree and Fry clans- with their appealing mix of chocolate and social idealism- are today better remembered than that of the Tukes. But the artist's forebears gained renown through having brought, over several generations, a comparable Quaker idealism to a very different endeavour: the better care and treatment of the mentally ill. Tuke's ancestors established The Retreat at York in the 1790s. Initially only for afflicted members of the Society of Friends (Quakers), it came to be seen as the archetype for a newly humane kind of 'moral therapy' through which the patient would be gently exhorted to recover their equilibrium without any sort of coercion or physical restraint. The artist's father, Dr. Daniel Hack Tuke, succeeded in this family tradition, becoming the single most prominent British psychiatrist of the second half of the nineteenth century. (That term was not yet in regular use in English and he and his colleagues were rather known as medical psychologists or alienists.)"

"Although Henry Scott Tuke did not follow his father into medicine, the two men found themselves, in very different contexts, looked to for some kind of answer as to how male same-sex desire might be brought into public discourse. Yet each himself maintained a silence on the subject that some of their contemporaries, and some later historians, have struggled to understand."

"Tuke was consistently devoted to painting the bodies of boys and young men. As Andrew Stephenson explores in Chapter 4, the resulting pictures enjoyed a very broad currency, becoming a staple of London exhibitions over many years and selling both to private collectors and museums in substantial numbers. They were widely discussed among Uranians- contemporary bookish slang for sophisticated homosexual men such as Tuke's friends the journalist Charles Kains-Jackson and the historian Horatio Brown. The artist's own public verbal comments never go near any potential erotic content, and yet such content seems evident to us today. It seems somehow Tuke was confidently 'speaking' a visual language that had not yet been codified, or not yet acknowledged to exist (see Michael hatt's chapter in this volume)."