Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/668

 638 Painting and very ambitious man, and his want of success led to his melancholy end. Amongst painters of fruit and flowers in England, George Lance (1802 — 1864) ranks with Van Huysum in Holland. He was a pupil of Haydon. "William Etty (1787 — 1849), a man of great industry, stands alone as the English artist who has gone nearest to a mastery of the difficulties of the nude human figure, and has approached to the brilliant transparency of the old Venetians in his flesh-tints. The early part of his career was beset with difficulties of every kind : his merits were unappreciated, his faults exaggerated, the technical excellences of his work were not understood ; and as a rule, the subjects he chose did not appeal with any force to the popular sympathies. Yet, in spite of all these discouragements, he worked out for himself an original style, and won a place amongst the very first British artists. To quote his own words, Etty's aim in all his important pictures was " to paint some great moral on the heart." The Combat, or Woman Pleading for Mercy; Benaiah, David's Chief Captain ; Ulysses and the Syrens, three pictures of Joan of Arc, and three of Judith, now in the Royal Scottish Academy, are named by the artist himself as his best works ; but we must also mention Youth on the Prow and Pleasure at the Helm, the Bather, and the Wife of Candaules, king of Lydia, in the National Gallery ; and Venus Descending ; and Cupid sheltering Psyche, in the South Kensington Museum, as extremely fine examples of the beauty of form and truth of flesh- tints characteristic of everything produced by Etty. Sir Charles Eastlake (1793—1865), a man of high scholarship and varied accomplishments, exercised an