El amanecer del amor

William Etty built his career on painting the nude, and in 1828, when he showed this, it cost him. He took a couple of lines from Milton's masque Comus, Venus now wakes, and wakens Love, and painted a nude Venus leaning across to rouse the sleeping Cupid by stroking his wing. The Times allowed that the drawing flowed and the colour was rich, then called the treatment too luscious for the public eye. Others found the Venus too fleshy, too much in debt to Rubens, and simply obscene. The complaints followed the picture for decades. It was left out of the big Etty retrospective in 1849, and when it was shown in Glasgow in 1899 it drew fresh objections. Sir Merton Russell-Cotes bought it in 1889, and it has stayed in his gallery in Bournemouth ever since.