Seated Youth with a Staff

by 1814

By 1814 he is admired for colour and flesh tones

By 1814 Etty was widely respected at the Royal Academy for his use of colour and in particular for his ability to paint realistic flesh tones.

1816

Rejected in love, he sets out for the Continent

Having had little success, Etty decided to spend a year in Italy studying the great collections, since England had no public galleries with permanent collections. The 28-year-old was in love and fretted over what marriage would mean for the journey, but the woman rejected him, and in early September 1816 he left for the Continent and landed at Dieppe; before that he had been abroad only briefly, in France in early 1815.

September – October 1816

Homesick in Florence, he turns back

Travelling via Rouen, Paris and Switzerland, where he was homesick and irritated until the Simplon Pass and the landscapes of Piedmont revived his spirits, Etty reached Florence in late September. He fell into a deep depression (on 5 October he wrote to his brother that he felt too lonely to be happy), was unable to study, and within a month of arriving in Italy began the journey home.

26 October 1816

A week in Regnault’s studio in Paris

On 26 October 1816, on the way back, Etty stopped in Paris and enrolled in the atelier of Jean-Baptiste Regnault, but left after a week, finding it rowdy and too full of Frenchmen. He also attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts and amassed a large quantity of prints from the Paris art shops, then, still homesick, returned to London in November.

1817

First favourable press review

His two paintings at the 1817 Summer Exhibition, “Bacchanalians: a Sketch” and “Cupid and Euphrosyne”, drew a favourable review from William Paulet Carey in the Literary Gazette, who found the first a fine classical invention and the second full of promise. Carey was later proud to have been the first critic to recognise Etty’s potential and championed him throughout his career; Etty appears to have developed as a painter during his travels.