Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929) - Portrait Of A Man, 1883

Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929)
Portrait of a Man, 1883
Oil on panel
27 x 35 cm
55 x 46 cm with its frame (small accidents to the frame to report)
Signed and dated upper left "HS Tuke 11 mai 1883"

Henry Scott Tuke (June 2, 1858 – March 13, 1929) was a British painter best known for his paintings depicting usually naked young men or teenagers, in a natural setting. The nature of his paintings, tinged with eroticism, and his encounters with famous homosexual writers of his time such as Oscar Wilde and John Addington Symonds, earned him presentation by galleries as a pioneer of the gay subculture Tuke is born in the city of York of a large family of Quakers. His father, Daniel Hack Tuke, campaigned in particular for people with mental illness to receive humane treatment. His great-great-grandfather, William Tuke, had founded one of the first modern psychiatric hospitals in York in 1792. His great-grandfather Henry Tucke, his grandfather Samuel Tuke and his uncle James Hack Tuke were also activists recognized humanists. In 1874 the family moved to London and Henry Scott Tuke entered the Slade School of Art. He then traveled to Italy (from 1880 to 1881) then to Paris (1883) where he studied with the painter Jean-Paul Laurens and met the American painter John Singer Sargent, and the French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage, who encouraged him to paint outdoors. During the year 1880, Tuke had also met the writer Oscar Wilde as well as other poets and homosexual figures of the time. He himself wrote a poem in celebration of adolescent youth entitled "Sonnet to the youth", which he published anonymously in The Artist. He also gave an essay to The Studio magazine. Tuke then returned to England and joined a small community of artists in Newlyn. This group included Walter Langley, Albert Chevallier Tayler and Thomas Cooper Gotch; the latter, specializing in paintings of young girls, became a great friend. This group of painters is known by art historians as the Newlyn School. In 1885 Tuke settled in Falmouth, a fishing port in Cornwall, then still a rustic region of the country. He bought a fishing boat which he made his quarters by converting it into a workshop. It was here that he could discreetly develop his passion for painting young boys. Most of his role models were young local boys. His canvases therefore show these boys fishing, swimming, usually naked, on a boat, or on the beach. Tuke also produced more conventional works on historical themes. More easily salable, his canvases with mythological themes also allowed him to place nudes, but critics of the time found the result flat, inanimate and conventional. From the 1890s, Henry Scott Tuke abandoned mythological themes and devoted himself exclusively to painting local boys swimming and fishing. He also begins to paint in a more naturalistic way, his technique is freed and he uses fresher colors. One of his best-known canvases from this period is August Blue (1893-1894), a study of four nudes bathing from a boat. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy (RA) on May 8, 1914. Although Tuke's paintings clearly hint at his attraction to teenagers, none of them are explicitly sexual. The sex of the models is rarely visible and the subjects are never in contact with each other. Tuke developed friendly relationships with his role models, but there is never evidence that he had deeper relationships with them, either romantically or sexually. Although it is possible, and probably almost certain, that he had sexual relations with young men, it is also probable that he, like many homosexual individuals of his time, crystallized his sexuality in romantic and platonic relationships as well as through art. Because of these sulphurous subjects, Tuke was unable to sell many of his works, except in the restricted circles of homosexual art collectors. Fortunately, he was also recognized as a portrait painter and managed to live on commissions from his London studio. Among his known portraits is that of the officer and writer Thomas Edward Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia). Nevertheless, Tuke had built a good reputation, sufficient to allow him to live decently and to travel in France, Italy, as well as in India. In 1900 a dinner was given in his honor at the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society. The last years of his life were marked by illness, until his death in 1929. Technically, the painter favored a raw, almost impressionistic execution, at a time when the smooth and irreproachable technique of neo-classicism was favored by critics. He had a great sense of color and excelled in depicting natural light, particularly the soft, fragile hues of the English summer. If the subjects of his paintings had been more orthodox, Tuke might have been counted among the major British painters. But his choices made him a niche painter, confined by his theme. After his death in 1929, Tuke's reputation sank and he was largely forgotten until the 1970s, only to be rediscovered by the first generation of openly gay artists and art collectors. He has since become a figure in gay cultural circles, the subject of several publications and inflations at various auctions.