Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to B

Background

William Etty (1787–1849), the seventh son of a York baker and miller, had originally been an apprentice printer in Hull, but on completing his seven-year apprenticeship at the age of 18 moved to London to become an artist. Strongly influenced by the works of Titian and Rubens, he submitted a number of paintings to the Royal Academy of Arts and the British Institution, all of which were either rejected outright or drew little attention when exhibited. In 1821 the Royal Academy accepted and exhibited one of his works, The Arrival of Cleopatra in Cilicia (also known as The Triumph of Cleopatra). Cleopatra was extremely well received, and many of Etty's fellow artists greatly admired him. He was elected a full Royal Academician in 1828, ahead of John Constable.

Following the success of Cleopatra, over the next decade Etty tried to replicate its success by painting nude figures in biblical, literary and mythological settings. Between 1820 and 1829 Etty exhibited 15 paintings, of which 14 depicted nude figures. While some nude paintings by foreign artists existed in private collections, England had no tradition of nude painting and the display and distribution of nude material to the public had been suppressed since the 1787 Proclamation for the Discouragement of Vice. Etty was the first British artist to specialise in the nude, and although his portraits of male nudes were generally well received, many critics condemned his repeated depictions of female nudity as indecent.

Subject

Candaules depicts a scene from the first book of the Histories by Herodotus. Candaules, king of the ancient kingdom of Lydia, believed his wife Nyssia to be the world's most beautiful woman. He discussed his wife's beauty with his favourite bodyguard Gyges, but felt Gyges was lying when he told him that he agreed about her beauty. Candaules arranged, over the protests of Gyges, for Gyges to hide behind his bedroom door and secretly watch Nyssia undressing without her knowledge. Although he was unhappy at being forced to take part, Gyges reluctantly hid behind the door and watched Nyssia undress. Nyssia noticed Gyges as he slipped out of the room afterwards, but remained silent.

The next day, Nyssia summoned Gyges and condemned him for his breach of custom in spying on her naked. Gyges was given the choice of killing Candaules for his instigation of the plot, or of his own suicide; he reluctantly chose to save his own life by murdering his master. The next night, Gyges hid behind the same door from which he had watched the naked Nyssia, and stabbed Candaules while he slept, taking Nyssia as his own wife and declaring himself King of Lydia. The Delphic Oracle confirmed Gyges as king, as the first of the Mermnad dynasty, and he reigned for 38 years.

Composition

Candaules shows the moment at which Gyges, hiding behind the door, first catches sight of Nyssia's naked body. Candaules lies naked in bed, while Nyssia undresses as she prepares to join him, and Gyges tiptoes around the door to catch a glimpse of her. Nyssia holds a piece of fabric, which forms a vertical line cutting off the body of Candaules at the top of his legs, invoking a theme of emasculation at the hands of a powerful woman. By positioning the figures in such a way that none are looking out of the picture, and the viewer is directly behind Nyssia, Etty intended that the viewer feel the same sense of voyeurism and intrusion that Gyges would have felt, forced to spy on his master's naked wife against his will and without her knowledge. The cluttered arrangement of drapery and architectural features intentionally exaggerates the claustrophobic and implicitly violent nature of the scene.

Etty was a regular attender at the Royal Academy's life class throughout his career. Nyssia stands in a pose which Etty had sketched many times, that of a woman with her knee on a raised plinth and one arm raised holding a hanging rope. (Throughout his career Etty had difficulty painting arms, and generally showed his subjects holding their arms away from their body to expose as much of their torso as possible.) It is possible that Etty intentionally chose the obscure subject of the painting as a pretext to paint a woman in this pose. As with many Etty works the female figure has a far better finish than the rest of the canvas, and it is likely Etty painted Nyssia directly from a life model, completing the rest of the composition later in a studio.

Candaules was completed and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1830. Etty felt that the moral lesson of the story was that women were not male chattels, and that if men—even their husbands—violated a woman's rights she was within her rights to punish them. However, he made little effort to explain what was, at the time, an unusual view, instead allowing viewers to form their own judgement of the piece. Thus, unusually for a painting of the time, Candaules appears morally highly ambiguous, inviting the viewer to sympathise either with the sexually immoral Candaules, the murderous Nyssia or the voyeuristic Gyges.

Reception

From its unveiling, Candaules was condemned by the press as a cynical combination of a pornographic picture and a violent and unpleasant narrative, and there was near-unanimous consensus that the picture was inappropriate for public exhibition. The Literary Gazette condemned the work as "against decency and good taste", and Etty as tending in Candaules towards the type of "debasing sensuality" one would expect from a foreigner, not the "purer" British school of painting. The reviewer also criticised the theme of the painting, saying that "as an academic study, the central figure of this group might be admissible; but, in connexion with the disgraceful story, it deserves to be warmly reprehended". La Belle Assemblée, one of Britain's most influential women's magazines, praised Etty's other exhibits at the Summer Exhibition but refused to review Candaules altogether, saying that "to us the subject is so offensive that we pass it over". Even Alexander Gilchrist, generally one of Etty's strongest supporters, in his 1855 biography of Etty described Candaules as "almost the only instance among Etty's works, of an undeniably disagreeable, not to say objectionable subject", while Sarah Burnage of the University of York says that "it is perhaps hard to see the painting as anything but a deliberate attempt by the artist to shock and scandalise".

Legacy

Despite the hostility with which Candaules was met on its exhibition, it was bought by Robert Vernon, who had made a fortune supplying horses to the military and was using the proceeds to amass a major art collection. Vernon presented his collection to the nation in 1847, although in the case of Candaules a painting so controversial becoming government property was a source of some embarrassment. In 1929 Candaules was transferred to the newly expanded Tate Gallery, where it remains.

The condemnation with which Candaules was met meant it remained a controversial piece. When Samuel Carter Hall was choosing works to illustrate his newly launched The Art Journal, he considered it important to promote new British artists, even if it meant illustrations which some readers considered pornographic or offensive. In 1849 Hall secured reproduction rights to the 157 paintings which Vernon had given to the nation but declined to distribute reproductions of Candaules, despite his willingness to publish reproductions of other provocative Etty nudes such as Female Bathers Surprised by a Swan.

Shortly after Candaules was exhibited Etty, needled by repeated attacks from the press on his supposed tastelessness, indecency and lack of creativity, decided to produce an explicitly moral piece. The result was his 1832 The Destroying Angel and Daemons of Evil Interrupting the Orgies of the Vicious and Intemperate, which was seen by many as a renunciation of his earlier, more openly sensual works. Etty remained a prominent painter of nudes, but from 1832 onwards made conscious efforts to reflect moral lessons. Despite this he continued to be regarded as a pornographer by many, long after his death in 1849; as late as 1882 Vanity Fair was able to comment that "I know only too well how the rough and his female companion behave in front of pictures such as Etty's bather. I have seen the gangs of workmen strolling round, and I know that their artistic interest in studies of the nude is emphatically embarrassing."

Interest in Etty declined after his death as new movements came to characterise painting in Britain, and by the end of the 19th century the cost of all his paintings had fallen below their original prices. Very few subsequent artists have been influenced by Etty, and one of the few later works on which Candaules can be considered an influence is The Knight Errant, painted by John Everett Millais in 1870, which in its depiction of a rape victim, distraught and with her face turned away from the viewer, was a return to the style developed by Etty in Candaules of forcing the viewer to feel complicity in witnessing the sexual degradation of a woman, and which drew similar criticism.