"Nature Unveiling Herself" by William Etty

Nature Unveiling Herself

William Etty (1787-1849)

Oil and graphite on board

63.5 x 33 cm (25 x 13 inches)

Signed, upper centre: "Etty. Dec.r 1842. / No 14" (in oil).

Inscription over signature: "Visitor / 'Nature unveiling herself' / Etty" (in graphite).

Provenance: bought as Lot 161, Christie's, 28th March 2007.

This is an unusual work in many respects. It is, for example, rare to find a small Etty painting that is signed, let alone one dated so precisely and titled within the main body of the work. The composition is also unusual in terms of Etty's own practice and more generally. Etty's nudes are usually richly coloured and shadowed, with contraposto poses. The present work is much barer with a restricted colour range, and is almost aggressive in its emphatically frontal display.

The relation between the title of the work and its appearance is subtly dialectical. On the one hand, the insistently displayed frontality shows the woman without the usual compositional trappings that would (as it were) dress her up as a classical, academically sanctioned nude. On the other hand, the title Nature Unveiling Herself provides a contextual factor that allows the blatancy of visual address to be made respectable as an allegory. [Paul Crowther’s commentary continued below]

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Commentary by Paul Crowther

The relation between the blatant frontal presentation and allegorical aspect allows a new—and provocative—meaning to emerge. The vehicle of allegorical "unveiling" is the woman's body in its real physicality. This is wonderfully emphasized through the allegory-constituting gesture itself—namely, the declaration of the woman's frontality through both her naked posture and the act of holding up the blanket. In visual combination, these two factors create a form suggestive of the clitoris (an allusive device later used by twentieth-century artists, most notably Georgia O'Keeffe).

On these terms, Etty's composition does not allow allegorization to deflect from the real physicality of the female body, rather the allegorizing strategy itself suggests an aspect of the female anatomy which is usually excluded from academic works. And all this is achieved independently of that male-oriented gaze which is the usual terminus for the female nude in art. One would expect a fully frontal female nude to be a major object of male desire. But, in Etty's painting—starting from the curiously disinterested facial expression of the model—the shadows and highlights invest the woman with a muscularity that does not present her flesh and skin as available for desire. She has, rather, real flesh and skin that declares, and is declared by, the body's vital symmetries. This is why the close visual harmony between the model's body (especially her strong raised arms) and the blanket and broader background, is so meaningful. It is not merely a ground that makes the body available for visual consumption; rather there is a stronger sense—in formal terms—of kinship between the body and its setting. Etty's painting presents the unveiling of nature as an act of human revelation, but one that is only possible insofar as the body itself is an aspect of a more encompassing natural order.

You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the Crowther-Oblak Collection of Victorian Art and and the National Gallery of Slovenia and the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway (2) and link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.

Bibliography

Crowther, Paul. Awakening Beauty: The Crowther-Oblak Collection of Victorian Art. Exhibition catalogue. Ljubljana: National Gallery of Slovenia; Galway: Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, 2014. No. 33.

Crowther-Oblak
Collection

Last modified 8 December 2014