Henry Scott Tuke (12 June 1858 – 13 March 1929) was an English artist. His most notable work was in the Impressionist style and he is best known for his paintings of nude boys and young men.
Trained at the Slade School of Art under Alphonse Legros and Sir Edward Poynter, Tuke developed a close relationship with the Newlyn School of painters, his work being exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, of which he became a Full Member. In addition to his achievements as a figurative painter, he was an established maritime artist and produced many portraits of sailing ships. He was highly prolific, with over 1,300 works listed and more being discovered.
Henry Scott Tuke was born at Lawrence Street, York, into the prominent Quaker Tuke family. His older brother William Samuel Tuke was born two years earlier in 1856. His father, Daniel Hack Tuke (1827–1895), a well-known medical doctor specialising in psychiatry, was a campaigner for humane treatment of the insane. His great-great-grandfather William Tuke had founded the Retreat at York, one of the first modern insane asylums, in 1796. His great-grandfather Henry Tuke, grandfather Samuel Tuke and uncle James Hack Tuke were also well-known social activists. The Tuke family's ancestry can be traced back to Sir Brian Tuke, who served as an adviser to King Henry VIII of England (replacing Sir Thomas More).
In 1859, the family moved to Falmouth in Cornwall where it was hoped the warmer climate would benefit Tuke's father, Daniel, who had developed symptoms of tuberculosis. Daniel survived there and lived until he was 68. He established a small doctor's practice in his house in Wood Lane. Henry's younger sister, Maria Tuke Sainsbury (1861–1947), who wrote a biography of her brother Henry after his death, was born there. William went on to study medicine but Henry, or Harry as he was called by the family, showed no interest in the profession.
Tuke was encouraged to draw and paint from an early age. He and his siblings were taught by a governess at home. Maria described their childhood in Falmouth as "a very happy and healthy one". The long summer days spent on the beach and swimming in the sea had a lasting effect on Tuke; other enduring memories were the firm friendships the young Tuke formed. In Falmouth Tuke was introduced to the pleasures of nude sea bathing, a habit he continued into old age.
In 1874, Tuke moved to London and enrolled in the Slade School of Art. After graduating he travelled 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 was little known in his lifetime.
During the 1880s, Tuke also met Oscar Wilde and other prominent poets and writers such as John Addington Symonds, most of whom were homosexual 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.
In 1883, Tuke returned to Britain and moved to Newlyn, Cornwall joining a small colony of artists including Walter Langley, Albert Chevallier Tayler and Thomas Cooper Gotch. These painters, and others, became known as the Newlyn School. He worked from Rose Cottage at Tregadgwith Farm, Cornwall at the head of the Lamorna valley.
In Newlyn, in 1884, Tuke completed his first painting of boys in boats. Called Summertime, it depicts two local boys, John Wesley Kitching and John Cotton, in a punt called Little Argo. Tuke's style was more impressionistic than that of the other Newlyn painters and he only stayed a short time. However, he remained close friends with many of the artists until his death.
Tuke painted oil studies of young male nudes during a tour of Italy in his early twenties in 1881, but the theme did not become central to his work until after 1885, when he had moved back to Falmouth, then still a secluded part of Cornwall and a part of the country with a very mild climate that was more agreeable for nude bathing. There Tuke focused on maritime scenes and portraits, which showed boys and young men bathing, fishing and sunbathing on sunny beaches.
He settled at Swanpool and bought a fishing boat for £40, 'Julie of Nantes', and converted it into a floating studio and living quarters. He rented two rooms in Pennance Cottage, situated between Pennance Point and Swanpool Beach.
The cottage remained Tuke's permanent base until his death, although he often lived aboard boats. Here he could indulge his passion for painting boys. His early models were brought down from London but he soon befriended some of the local fishermen and swimmers in Falmouth who became his close friends and models. These included Edward John "Johnny" Jackett (1878–1935), Charlie Mitchell (1885–1957), who looked after Tuke's boats, Willie Sainsbury, Tuke's eldest nephew, Leo Marshall, Georgie and Richard Fouracre (sons of his housekeeper), George Williams – younger son of close neighbours, Maurice Clift – nephew of a family friend, Ainsley Marks, Jack Rolling (in some sources misspelt "Rowling"), Freddy Hall, Bert White and Harry Cleave.
Owing to Tuke's habit of interchanging heads and bodies of his models in his paintings, it is often not possible to identify each figure exactly. All of Tuke's regular models were eventually called up during the First World War, and some did not return, including Maurice Clift (a model for August Blue) who was killed in France.
Tuke established an art gallery in Falmouth with William Ayerst Ingram as a commercial outlet mainly for their own paintings.
He would often commute to London as Falmouth was well served with a railway service and he was not therefore isolated from the London art scene. He produced numerous portraits of society figures, local officials and members of the Tuke family circle. He also painted many more saleable landscapes and was well regarded as a painter of ships in sail. Henry Scott Tuke was elected Associate of the Royal Academy in 1900 and Royal Academician in 1914.
Tuke favoured rough, visible brush strokes, 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. Although Tuke often finished paintings in the studio, photographic evidence shows that he worked mainly in the open air, which accounts for their freshness of colour and the realistic effects of sunlight reflected by the sea and on the naked flesh of his models.
In his early paintings, Tuke placed his male nudes in mythological contexts, but the critics 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 colour. One of his best-known paintings from this period is August Blue (1893–94; Tate, London), 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. Tuke painted some female nudes but these were not as successful as his male nude paintings.
Tuke's paintings of nude youths 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. Most of the paintings have the nude models standing or crouching on the beach facing out to sea, so only the back view is displayed.