Nude Woman Seated in a Landscape

When William Etty died in 1849, his studio was still full of work. At the sale held at Christie's in London the following May, buyers found hundreds of oil studies of the model, most of them painted quickly on millboard, a stiff, cheap card. Some were figures against a bare dark ground, and a number were later finished by other hands, given a setting that made them easier to sell as pictures.

This one is painted on paperboard, now mounted on a firmer board, and it carries no date. A woman seen from behind sits on a bank with a cloth across her hips, one foot reaching down toward the water, the trees around her kept dark and loose. The museum calls it simply a nude woman seated in a landscape. By the time it reached America, the taste that had made Etty famous had long gone. It belonged in 1937 to Sir Edward Cunard, a baronet of the shipping family, passed through the New York dealers Knoedler, and was sold to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1938 for 75 dollars.