"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."