Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJune 12th, 2016
(d. 1929) His Quaker family moved from York, where Henry was born, to Falmouth in Corwall, where the weather was warmer and, perhaps, more hospitable to his father’s tuberculosis. The warmer weather, and the nude sea bathing that was so commonly practiced there, would become the prime inspiration for Tuke’s paintings.
Tuke studied painting at the Slade School of Art in London from 1874 to 1880. After graduating, he traveled to Italy, then Paris, where he met the American painter John Singer Sargent (Jan 12). Back in London, he also rubbed shoulders with Oscar Wilde (Oct 16), John Addington Symonds (Oct 5) and several other poets and artists. In 1883, he joined an artist colony in Cornwall, where he completed his first planting of boys in boats, a subject which would inspire Tuke for the rest of his life.
Henry Scott Tuke, Ruby, Gold, and Malachite (1902)
In 1995, he returned to Falmouth, bought a fishing boat for £40, and refurbished it into his living quarters and studio. He also purchased a modest cottage in the town. His early models were boys from London, but soon some of the local fishermen and swimmers around Falmouth became both close friends and models. One of those models was Charlie Mitchell (1885-1957) — he’s the boy sitting on the rock in the lower left corner of Ruby, Gold and Malachite –was Tuke’s boatman for thirty years. When Tuke died in 1929, he left Mitchell £1,000 in his will (about £48,600 or US$69,300 in today’s valuations). All of his Falmouth models wound up getting called up during the First World War, and some of them didn’t return home.
Whatever conclusions one may draw from the nudity in Tuke’s paintings, they are never explicitly sexual. No genitals are shown, nor is there typically any physical contact, certainly none of an overtly sexual nature. But because the impressionistic influences of his work broke so completely with the frigid and formal conventions the public was used to seeing, the comparable freshness of Tuke’s works ruffled feathers among late Victorian critics. One patron, Martin Colnaghy, withdrew his support in 1886 when he caught sight of one of Tuke’s paintings.
Henry Scott Tuke, Off Falmouth (1896)
But as the Victorian era gave way to the Edwardian period and English impressionism became more popular, Tuke’s popularity grew. His nudes, augmented with landscapes, still lifes, maritime scenes and commissioned portraits, sold well enough to give him the wherewithal to travel abroad. Tuke was honored at the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society in 1900, and elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1914.
Tuke died in Falmouth in 1929, and was buried in a small cemetery near his home. He kept detailed diaries all his life, but only two survive. The other ten disappeared after Tuke’s sister wrote a very protective biography of him in 1933. After his death, his reputation faded. But in the 1970, a new generation of gay collectors rediscovered his work. More recently, he’s been the subject of numerous shows, a lavish monograph and biographies, and his paintings have been doing very well at auctions.
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