Henry Scott Tuke, RA (12 June 1858–13 March 1929), a British painter
and photographer, is best remembered for his paintings of naked boys
and young men, which have earned him a status as a pioneer of gay male
culture.
Tuke was born in York into a prominent family of Friends (Quakers). His
father Daniel Hack Tuke was a prominent campaigner for humane treatment
of the insane. His great-great-grandfather William Tuke had founded the
Retreat at York, one of the first modern insane asylums, in 1792 . His
great-grandfather Henry Tuke, grandfather Samuel Tuke and uncle James
Hack Tuke were also well-known social activists.
In 1874 Tuke moved with his family to London, where he enrolled in the
Slade School of Art. After graduating he traveled to Italy in 1880 ,
and from 1881 to 1883 he lived in Paris, where he studied with the
French history painter Paul Laurens and met the American painter John
Singer Sargent (who was also a painter of male nudes, although this
fact was little known in his lifetime).
During the 1880s Tuke also met Oscar Wilde and other prominent poets
and writers, most of them homosexuals (then usually called Uranian) who
celebrated the adolescent male. He wrote a "sonnet to youth" which was
published anonymously in The Artist, and also contributed an essay to
The Studio.
Tuke returned to Britain and moved to Newlyn, Cornwall joining a small
colony of artists. These included Walter Langley, Albert Chevallier
Tayler and Thomas Cooper Gotch a lifelong painter of the girl-child,
who became a lifelong friend. These painters and others are known to
art historians as the Newlyn School.
In 1885 Tuke settled in Falmouth, a fishing port in Cornwall, then
still a remote and romantically rustic part of the country, with a very
mild climate which is more agreeable for nude open air activities than
in most other British regions. He bought a fishing boat for 40 pounds
and converted it into a floating studio and living quarters. Here could
indulge his passion for painting boys in privacy. Most of his works
depict boys and young men who swim, dive and lounge, usually naked, on
a boat or on the beach.
Tuke also produced more saleable works on narrative or historical
themes. In these paintings Tuke placed his male nudes in safely
mythological contexts, but critics have usually found these works to be
rather formal, lifeless and flaccid.
From the 1890s, Tuke abandoned mythological themes and began to paint
local boys fishing, sailing, swimming and diving, and also began to
paint in a more naturalistic style. His handling of paint became freer,
and he began using bold, fresh color. One of his best known paintings
from this period is August Blue (1893-1894), a study of four nude
youths bathing from a boat.
Although Tuke's paintings of nude youths undoubtedly appealed to those
gay men who found adolescents attractive, they are never explicitly
sexual. The models' genitals are almost never shown, they are almost
never in physical contact with each other, and there is never any
suggestion of overt sexuality.
Tuke formed close friendships with many of his models, but it has never
been established that he was sexually involved with any of them, on
either a romantic or commercial basis. Although it is possible that he
was sexually active with local youths, it is equally possible that,
like many gay men in this period, he sublimated his sexuality into
romantic friendships, and into his art.
Because of his subject matter, Tuke was unable to sell many of his
works, except to a select circle of homosexual art collectors. But he
was also well known as a portraitist, and maintained a London studio to
work on his commissions. Among his best known portraits is that of
soldier and writer T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia").
Technically, Tuke favored rough, visible brushstrokes, at a time when a
smooth, polished finish was favoured by fashionable painters and
critics. He had a strong sense of colour and excelled in the depiction
of natural light, particularly the soft, fragile sunlight of the
English summer. Had his choice of subject matter been more orthodox,
Tuke might have become a major name in British painting: as it was he
remained a niche painter.
Nevertheless, Tuke did enjoy a considerable reputation, and he did well
enough from his painting to be able to travel abroad, painting in
France, Italy and the West Indies. In 1900 a banquet was held in his
honour at the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society. He was elected to the
Royal Academy of Arts in 1914 . In later life he was in poor health for
many years, and died in Falmouth in 1929.
After his death Tuke's reputation faded, and he was largely forgotten
until the 1970s, when he was rediscovered by the first generation of
openly gay artists and art collectors. He has since become something of
a cult figure in gay cultural circles, with lavish editions of his
paintings published and his works fetching high prices at auctions.
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