Musidora: The Bather 'At the Doubtful Breeze Alarmed'

Musidora: The Bather 'At the Doubtful Breeze Alarmed', also known as The Bather, is a name given to four nearly identical oil paintings on canvas by English artist William Etty. The paintings illustrate a scene from James Thomson's 1727 poem Summer in which a young man accidentally sees a young woman bathing naked, and is torn between his desire to look and his knowledge that he ought to look away. The scene was popular with English artists as it was one of the few legitimate pretexts to paint nudes at a time when the display and distribution of nude imagery was suppressed.

Other than minor differences in the background landscape, the four paintings are identical in composition. The first version was exhibited in 1843. Two versions are in public collections, one in Tate Britain and one in the Manchester Art Gallery; one of these was painted in 1844 and first exhibited in 1846 and the other was painted at around the same time; it is not known which is the version exhibited in 1846. A fourth version is of poorer quality and may be a later copy by a student.

Musidora was extremely well received when first exhibited, and considered one of the finest works by an English artist. Etty died in 1849 and his work rapidly went out of fashion. At the same time, the topic of Musidora itself became a cliche, and from the 1870s Thomson's writings faded into obscurity. Etty's Musidora is likely to have influenced The Knight Errant by John Everett Millais, but other than that has had little influence on subsequent works. The Tate's version of the painting was exhibited in major exhibitions in 2001–02 in London and in 2011–12 in York.

William Etty (1787–1849), the seventh child of a York baker and miller, began his career as an apprentice printer in Hull at the age of 11. On completing his seven-year apprenticeship he moved to London "with a few pieces of chalk crayons", with the intention of becoming a history painter in the tradition of the Old Masters, and studied under renowned artist Thomas Lawrence. Strongly influenced by the works of Titian and Rubens, Etty submitted numerous paintings to the Royal Academy of Arts and the British Institution, all of which were either rejected or received little attention when exhibited.

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