Etty William oil painting antique, England oil paintings

William Etty
English Romantic artist
born 10 March 1787 - died 13 November 1849

Teacher of: William Collins (1788-1847) in 1807

British painter, was born at York, on the 10th of March 1787. His father had been in early life a miller, but had finally established himself in the city of York as a baker of spice-bread.

After, some scanty instruction of the most elementary kind, the future painter, at the age of eleven and a half, left the paternal roof, and was bound apprentice in the printing-office of the Hull Packet. Amid many trials and discouragements William Etty completed his term of seven years’ servitude, and having in that period come by practice, at first surreptitious, though afterwards allowed by his master “in lawful hours,” to know his own powers, William Etty removed to London.

The kindness of an elder brother and a wealthy uncle, William Etty, himself an artist, stood him in good stead. William Etty commenced his training by copying without instruction from nature, models, prints, &c. — his first academy, as William Etty himself says, being a plaster-cast shop in Cock Lane, Smithfield. Here William Etty made a copy from an ancient cast of Cupid and Psyche, which was shown to Opie, and led to his being enrolled in 1807 as student of the Academy, whose schools were at that time conducted in Somerset House. Among his fellow scholars at this period of his career were some who in after years rose to eminence in their art, such as Wilkie, Haydon, Collins, Constable. His uncle generously paid the necessary fee of one hundred guineas, and in the summer of 1807 William Etty was admitted to be a private pupil of Sir Thomas Lawrence, who was at the very acme of his fame. Etty himself always looked on this privilege as one of incalculable value, and till his latest day regarded Lawrence as one of the chief ornaments of British art. For some years after William Etty quitted Sir Thomas’s studio, even as late as 1816, the influence of his preceptor was traceable in the mannerism of his works. Though William Etty had by this time made great progress in his art, his career was still “one of almost continual failure, hardly cheered by even a passing ray of success”. In 1811, after repeated rejections, William Etty had the satisfaction of seeing his Telemachus rescuing Antiope on the walls of the Academy. It was badly hung, however, and attracted little notice. For the next five years William Etty persevered with quiet and constant energy in overcoming the disadvantages of his early training with yearly growing success, and William Etty was even beginning to establish something like a name when in 1816 William Etty resolved to improve his knowledge of art by a journey to Italy. After an absence of three months, however, William Etty was compelled to return borne without having penetrated farther south than Florence. Struggles and vexations still continued to harass him; but William Etty bore up against them with patient endurance and force of will. In 1820 his Coral-finders, exhibited at the Royal Academy, attracted much attention, and its success was more than equalled by that of Cleopatra’s arrival in Cilicia, shown in the following year. In 1822 William Etty again set out on a tour to Italy, taking Paris on his way, and astonishing his fellow-students at the Louvre by the rapidity and fidelity with which William Etty copied from the old masters in that gallery. On. arriving at Rome William Etty immediately resumed his studies of the old masters, and elicited many expressions of wonder from his Italian fellow-artists for the same qualities which had gained the admiration of the French. Though Etty was duly impressed by the grand chefs-d’oeuvre of Raphael and Michelangelo at Rome, William Etty was not sorry to exchange that city for Venice, which William Etty always regarded as the true home of art in Italy. His own style as a colourist held much more of the Venetian than of any other Italian school, and William Etty admired his prototypes with a zeal and exclusiveness that sometimes bordered on extravagance. - Etty William oil painting antique, England oil paintings - antique Etty William oil painting supplier, England antique oil paintings Etty William Bio by England antique oil painting Etty William, supply England oil paintings antique.

The titles of oil painting old master William Etty