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The painter Henry Scott Tuke brings to mind two words: boys and boats. Two joint exhibitions in Cornwall held to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Tuke’s birth in large measure demonstrate the truth of this preconception. In 1924, towards the end of the artist’s career, theLiverpool Daily Courier published a cartoon in which a boy in the water shouts to a boy sitting in a boat, ‘Hey! It’s my turn to be in the boat, you were in last year and the year before.’

The exhibitions, in Truro and Falmouth, also reveal Tuke’s artistic development and show lesser-known areas of his work, such as portraits and landscapes. They are accompanied by a readable and informative book by the exhibitions’ curator, Catherine Wallace. The result of four years’ work, book and exhibitions together seek to claim for Tuke a significant place in the late-Victorian and Edwardian art world.

The Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro is holding the major retrospective. It begins with early studies and portraits of friends and family members, including an 1880 portrait of Edith and Gertrude Santley and Caroline Yates from York Art Gallery that is ambitiously painted under the influence of Caravaggio, with a striking contrast of light and deep shadow. Tuke’s portraits – such as those of his father and sister – could be exceptionally sensitive; they were not, however, innovative but he continued with them because they were lucrative and helped finance his other interests. From these he moved on to his Newlyn and early Falmouth years with scenes of fishermen and the lives of the people with whom he was living. In 1889 he had his first great triumph when All Hands to the Pump! was purchased for the nation for £420. It is a powerful work dominated by a massive ship’s mast with the crew around it attempting to shorten the sail. Tuke was not an action painter, and it is too obvious that the figures were arranged in the studio – a problem he never fully overcame.
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Three years earlier, in 1886, he had been one of the founders of the New English Art Club and around this time he must have started painting the pictures of nude boys for which he is most famous, working en plein air in a secluded cove close to his house. This work was artistically – and perhaps psychologically – liberating for him: hisBathers of 1888 is much fresher and brighter than anything he had ever done before. Tuke’s years of greatest success follow afterwards. At a time when the nude was invariably female and usually painted in an historical context, his nudes were male and modern. Although we might read the pictures differently now, at the time naked bathing was associated with health, outdoors and comradeship – even with innocence. And so in 1894 August Blue, a sensory celebration of sunlight on sea and sky and skin in which the heat haze is almost tangible, became Tuke’s second picture to be purchased for the nation.

August Blue is included in the Falmouth exhibition, ‘The Sunshine Paintings of Henry Scott Tuke’. It also includes another major picture, Midsummer Morning (Fig. 2), demonstrating again what Tuke called ‘this fascinating problem [which] interests me more than anything else in life – the play of outdoor light and sunshine on the human form. In pursuit of it I have seen the most beautiful things that eyes can see’. It would be perverse to deny the homoeroticism of Tuke’s work. The 148 works depicted in Wallace’s book include many paintings of women and girls, but all, save one little Italian girl drinking out of a bowl, are fully clothed. There are 63 naked youths – his ideal was the mid to late teens; aesthetically speaking, by the time a youth reached manhood, Tuke was less interested.

This sense of yearning for the beauty of young men can be overwhelming: a 1919 picture called Summer Dreams is so cheesy as to be embarrassing. Tuke himself seems to have been aware, consciously or not, of this discomfiture. However well composed the pictures are, the boys very rarely share eye contact, let alone touch one another, however lightly or accidentally. Therefore he could not explore in paint flesh against flesh, something only sunlight and shadow were allowed to do. We know nothing of Tuke’s sexual life. However, he has always had a gay following and he had friends among homosexual writers, such as the Uranian poets and John Addington Symonds (who asked for photographs of his models); it suggests that at very least he was comfortable in their milieu.
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The Falmouth exhibition includes a number of watercolours from his travels in the Mediterranean (Fig. 3) and Caribbean. Having achieved financial success in oil painting he was free to turn to a medium for which he had a natural feeling. He also employed watercolour for a number of his studies of tall ships (Tuke was Commodore of the Falmouth Sailing Club); the flimsy networks of rigging are painted with remarkable technical accuracy. Tuke was a major maritime artist and he painted as many pictures of ships as he did of human figures. These masts and rigging are echoed in studies of trees in A Sun-Girt Wood.(1909). Tuke never regarded himself as a landscape painter, but such pictures make one wish he had painted more.

When in 1929 Tuke died from the lingering effects of malaria caught in the Caribbean his work was out of fashion. A pastel offered in his will to the Tate was refused. In recent years, however, he has become much more acceptable and collectable. (Sir Elton John has lent generously to the exhibition.) This revival of interest is similar to that in John Singer Sargent, an artist who on first acquaintance in Paris had seemed to Tuke so polished and suave that ‘he made me feel I did not know what to do with my hands’. But Tuke lacks Sargent’s drive and brio; one always feels that something is held back. As a painter of naked youth and lost innocence, however, he is without parallel in British art.

 Simon Fenwick is a freelance archivist and writer on art. ‘Catching the Light: the Sunshine Paintings of Henry Scott Tuke’, Falmouth Art Gallery, 2 May -12 July (+44 [0] 01326 313863); ‘Catching the Light: A Retrospective of Henry Scott Tuke’, Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, 11 May -12 July (+44 [0] 1872 27 22 05). Catherine Wallace, ‘Catching the Light, The Life and Art of Henry Scott Tuke’, ISBN 978 1 873830 20 8 (cloth), £35 (Atelier Books).

The works illustrated here are by Henry Scott Tuke (1858-1929).

1 The Critics, 1928. Oil on canvas, 57.6 x 67.6 cm. Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum

2 Midsummer Morning, 1907. Oil on canvas, 183.5 x 137 cm. Sir Elton John

3 Genoa, 1904. Watercolour, 40.5 x 56 cm. Royal Watercolour Society, London

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