Etty took delight in what he called the ‘lustre, colour and fleshliness’ of the body, and  painted it with an enthusiasm bordering on mania. Five years after his death, his biographer Alexander Gilchrist wrote, 'Never weary of watching each shifting curve and outline, each tint, and tone, graduation of shade or colour, amid the inexhaustible effects of the Models before him; - he reproduced and interpreted them, as neither Old Master nor New, had done before' (Life of William Etty, R.A, pub. David Bogue, 1855). Forty years later, the artist J. E. Hodgson perceptively remarked, 'He proposed one thing to himself, to paint the naked body, and his views did not extend to the fulness of its beauty, to the grace of its curvature and the perfection of its structure; they were confined to the representation of the colour and the lustre of its skin' (Magazine of Art 1889, p 386).