If there are artists that present day artists aspire to emulate, Henry Scott Tuke would be one of them.
Born in York, England in 1858, he died at age seventy in 1929.
In 1874 Tuke’s family moved 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 Jean-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).
His motivation to paint teenage boys is unknown. For me the images are reminiscent of my own youth, those carefree, innocent days of exploring the world around us, uninhibited by self-imposed shame and the dictates of moral autocrats. 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.
During the 1880s Tuke also met Oscar Wilde and other prominent poets and writers, most of them homosexual (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.
