William Mulready

romanticism

William Mulready Paintings 1786 - 1863 Irish genre painter, Romanticism

Bathers Surprised, 1852

oil on panel, 59 x 44 cm, 23 x 17 in.

Nude Art

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OIL PAINTING: Bathers Surprised, 1852
Bathers Surprised was one of nine works selected by Mulready for the International Exhibition at Paris in 1855. He was awarded the Legion d'Honneur on the basis of his skills as a draughtsman (at a time when drawing was regarded a British deficiency), and of his ability to combine empirical observation with formal arrangement. This painting exemplifies Mulready's belief that the modern nude could express beauty without being moulded by some preconceived idea of the Antique. Here he offers a fresh interpretation of the Diana and Actaeon and Musidora themes beloved by British painters of the nude, instead presenting an open-ended narrative in which the confusion heralded by the announcement of a male intruder with his dog in the distance is formally presented by the disjunction between the urgent movement of the lissom athletic bodies scrambling up the bank and the tranquil seated figure oblivious of the panic behind her.
As Mulready began to supersede Etty as the foremost British artist of the nude, so he was regarded as a worthy successor to past masters of the genre. Both The Bathers and The Bathers Surprised were purchased by the banker Thomas Baring, a notable collector of both the Old Masters and the modern British school .