Henry Scott Tuke Biography (1858-1929)

Henry Scott Tuke

Victorian Painter. Portrait of T.E. Lawrence Print Noonday Heat Print Tuke Canvas Prints Search Site

Biog.
L I F E

1858-1929

Born in 1858, this fine genre and portrait painter studied at the Slade in London. He also pursued an artistic education in Florence from 1880, in Paris between 1881 and 1883, and under J.P. Laurens. On his return to England he settled in his native Cornwall, first at Newlyn, already a centre for French cell plein-air painting, and later in Falmouth, where he bought a boat.

He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1879 and also at the Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street, the New Water-colour Society, the Grosvenor Gallery, the New Gallery and the New English Art Club, as well as at many other prestigious artistic venues of the 19th century.

He was made a Member of the New English Art Club in 1886, an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1900 and a Member of the Academy in 1914. Most of his works reflected love and knowledge of the sea. His first work to attract attention was the dramatic "All Hands to the Pump", which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1889. His style, bold and realistic, was much admired for its feeling of sea and sunlight, and is well-suited to his scenes of rugged life on the Cornish coast.

He was also an industrious painter of male nudes, usually naked boys posed on sunlit beaches, and his many pictures and sketches of this type caused alarm at Victorian exhibitions. In turn, more cynical modern observers have dismissed Tuke’s work, although recent sales of his original paintings at auction have fetched remarkable prices.

Henry Scott Tuke is today, like John Macallan Swan (1847-1910), relatively little remembered as the painter of the male nude. He studied at the Slade and in Paris from 1881 to 1883, where he became fascinated by the challenfge of painting nude subjects in open-air rural settings. Later, in Florence, he began to specialize in painting boys and the effect of sunlight on naked flesh, returning in 1885 to Falmouth in Cornwall, his childhood home, where he made paintings of the rocky coast, sailing ships and fisherboys the major theme of his career. Tuke discussed in The Studio in 1895 his new interest in trying to 'study ... the undraped figure, to depict it with the pure daylight upon it, instead of the artificial lighting of the studio ... I always return to my first opinion, the truth and beauty of flesh in sunlight by the sea.'

These aims were achieved with particular effectiveness in Ruby, Gold and Mlachite, painted about two miles from Falmouth in the summer of 1902. Tuke's paintings became known through reproduction in The Studio, which also published photographs of nude Sicilian and Italian boys by the German Baron von Gloeden (1856-1931). and Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913), the self-styled Baron Corvo, author of the novel Hadrian the Seventh (1904). Corvo much admired Tuke's work, writing from Venice in vivid and powerful words: 'a painter like Tuke would have a free field here: for there is not a single painter of young Venetians poised on lofty poops, out on the wide lagoon, at white dawn, when the whole world gleams with the candid iridescence of mother-of-pearl, glowing white flesh with green blue eyes and shining hair ... Tuke is the only man alive who can do them [such paintings]; and he has not seen them ...'

Source: Victorian Painting

Further Reading: Catching the Light: The Art and Life of Henry Scott Tuke 1858-1929