ABSTRACT
Henry Scott Tuke was a minor Victorian artist whose epithet ‘Painter of Youth’ was, according to Emmanuel Cooper, ‘well-deserved’. Tuke’s largest and most important paintings are of the plein-air male adolescent nude, ‘usually by the sea, swimming, diving, lounging or lying, under a sky of Mediterranean blue’. In a society so notoriously adverse to the display of nudity, Tuke somehow prospered. Tuke’s framing of his chosen subject may originate in Romanticism’s idealised children, but his artistic strategies also resonate with Germaine Greer’s recent theorising about what is a boy. Indeed, for Julia F. Saville, Tuke’s ability ‘to achieve broad public acclaim’ rests on an erasure of boyhood sexuality, evoking instead an idyll of unchanging youthful health and strength that managed to engage his middle-class patrons without offending their sense of propriety. The notion of boyhood as a pre-sexual stage is evident in Kains-Jackson’s poetic response to Tuke’s painting published in The Artist.
