ETTY, WILLIAM (1787-1849), British painter, was born at York on March 10, 1787, the son of a baker and confectioner. At the age of eleven and a half William was bound apprentice in the printing-office of the Hull Packet. He completed his term of seven years, and having in that period come by practice, at first surreptitious, though afterwards allowed by his master "in lawful hours," to know his own powers, he removed to London.
The kindness of an elder brother and a wealthy uncle, William Etty, himself an artist, stood him in good stead. He began by copying without instruction from nature, models, prints, etc., his first academy, as he himself says, being a plaster-cast shop in Cock Lane, Smithfield. Here he made a copy from an ancient cast of Cupid and Psyche, which was shown to Opie, and led to his entry in 1807 as student of the Academy, whose schools were at that time conducted in Somerset House. Among his fel low scholars were Wilkie, Haydon, Collins and Constable. In the summer of 1807 he was admitted to be a private pupil of Sir Thomas Lawrence. For some years after he quitted Sir Thomas's studio, even as late as 1816, the influence of his master was traceable. In 1811, after repeated rejections, his "Telemachus Rescuing Antiope" was hung in the Academy. For the next five years he persevered with quiet and constant energy, and he was even beginning to establish something like a name when in 1816 he resolved on a journey to Italy. In 1820 his "Coral-finders," exhibited at the Royal Academy, had a great success, more than equalled by that of "Cleopatra's Arrival in Cilicia," shown in the following year. In 1822 he again set out on a tour to Italy. Though Etty was impressed by the grand chefs-d'oeuvre of Raphael and Michelangelo at Rome, he always regarded Venice as the true home of art in Italy. His wonderful colouring in his paintings of the nude owes much to his close study of and admira tion for the great Venetian masters.
Early in 1824 he returned home, and in that year he was made A.R.A. and in 1828 R.A. In the interval he had produced one of his greatest works, the "Combat (Woman interceding for the Vanquished)," and the first of the series of three pictures on the subject of Judith, both of which ultimately came into the possession of the Scottish Academy. Etty's career was from this time one of slow but uninterrupted success. During the next ten years of his life he was a constant attendant at the Academy life school, where he used to work regularly with the students, notwithstanding the remonstrances of some of his fellow-Acad emicians, who thought the practice undignified. The course of his studies was only interrupted by occasional visits to his native city, and to Scotland. On the occasion of one of these visits he gave the finishing touches to his trio of Judiths. In 1840 and again in 1841 Etty went to the Netherlands to study the master pieces of Rubens. Two years later he was in France collecting materials for what he called "his last epic," his famous picture of "Joan of Arc." In 1848 he retired to York, where many of his best pictures are to be seen. There are fine examples of Etty in the National Gallery and in South Kensington Museum, Lon don, notably "Youth at the Prow and Pleasure at the Helm." A collection of his pictures was shown in London in the summer of 1849; on Nov. 13 of that year he died. He received the honours of a public funeral in his native city.
The key to Etty's choice of subjects and his manner of painting is to be found in his own words : "When I found that all the great masters of antiquity had become thus great through painting great actions, and the human form, I resolved to paint nothing else; and, finding God's most glorious work to be Woman, that all human beauty had been concentrated in her, I resolved to dedicate myself to painting, not the draper's or milliner's work, but God's most glorious work, more finely than ever had been done." See Etty's autobiography, published in the Art Journal for 1849, and A. Gilchrist, Life of William Etty, R.A. (2 vols., 1855).