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.

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 he 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 mostly nude youths bathing from a boat. The Looe artist, Lindsay Symington ( 1872-1942), modelled for the blonde boy holding onto the boat in the water; though not a regular model, Symington was a good friend of Tuke, the latter often visiting the Symington family home, Pixies’ Holt, at Dartmeet.

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.

However, 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 honor 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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