A Nymph and Cupid: 'The Snake in the Grass' (copy after Joshua Reynolds)

A Nymph and Cupid: The Snake in the Grass (copy after Joshua Reynolds), painted around 1805 and now in the Worcester City Art Gallery, copies Reynolds's allegorical work depicting a nymph with Cupid — the snake in the grass suggesting hidden danger within apparent innocent beauty. Reynolds's original (1784, St Petersburg, Hermitage) employed classical references to warn against the deceptiveness of love, a theme that allowed both painter and viewer to engage sensuous material under the cover of moral instruction. Etty's copy after Reynolds, like his other Old Master copies, served simultaneously as technical exercise and as a declaration of artistic lineage — placing himself in relationship to Britain's most celebrated history painter. Worcester City Art Gallery, housed in a Victorian building in the Foregate Street cultural district, holds this work within a collection that represents British art across multiple centuries.

Working from Reynolds's original, Etty translates the composition into his own warmer palette, with more sensuous flesh painting than Reynolds's cooler, more restrained approach to the nude.