"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."