Henry Scott Tuke: Pleasant escapism or iconic images of gay love?

The story of how Henry Scott Tuke’s art has shifted over the last century is a fascinating reflection of our shifting attitudes to homosexuality and the male nude, writes William Cook

‘Ruby, Gold and Malachite’, 1902, Guildhall Art Gallery, London (Henry Scott Tuke)

At Watts Gallery, a picturesque museum in leafy Surrey, curator Cicely Robinson is showing me round a room full of male nudes. Young men (some of them very young) are bathing and sunbathing – flexing their lithe, naked bodies, basking in the summer sunshine. Put like that, you might suppose that this exhibition was rather salacious – tasteful erotica at best, possibly something a bit more untoward. Well, you’d be wrong, because this is an exhibition devoted to one of the most admired and respected English artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – and the story of how our view of these paintings has shifted over the last 100 years is a fascinating reflection of our shifting attitudes to homosexuality and the male nude.

Henry Scott Tuke’s male nudes can be viewed on various different levels. For some viewers, they’re simply pleasant, escapist pastorals. For other viewers, they’re iconic images of gay love. “The variety of interpretations is something we’ve tried to draw out with the exhibition,” says Robinson, who’s chief curator of Watts Gallery. “It’s something that’s still very relevant today.”

Henry Scott Tuke was born in 1858 in York, into a respectable Quaker family. His father, who came from a long line of illustrious psychiatrists, suffered from tuberculosis, so when Henry was a baby the family moved to Falmouth, on the Cornish coast, in the hope that the sea air and warmer weather would do Dad’s chest some good. For father and son, it was a blessing. Henry’s father survived until his late sixties (a decent innings in Victorian England) and Henry enjoyed an idyllic childhood. Growing up beside the seaside, in one of the balmiest parts of Britain, he acquired a passion for sailing and swimming, which fed into his finest works of art.