Four Girls by a Stream

Four Girls by a Stream, painted around 1805 and now in the Ashmolean Museum, represents Etty's early attempt to unite his figure painting with landscape in the manner of Titian's poesie and the pastoral tradition that ran from Giorgione through Claude Lorrain to the contemporary British landscape school. The setting — a verdant stream bank suggestive of the English countryside as much as Arcadia — reflects Etty's training in the British landscape tradition alongside his continental figure study. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Britain's oldest public museum (opened 1683), holds Etty's work alongside a comprehensive collection of European painting from ancient through modern times. The figure composition challenges Etty to organize four differently posed nude or semi-nude figures in spatial coherence within a naturalistic setting — a compositional problem that connects academic figure drawing to the landscape tradition. Even at this early career stage, the warm flesh painting that would become his signature is evident in the treatment of the girls' skin against the cooler landscape tones.

Etty integrates the four figures with the surrounding landscape through a unified warm tonality and soft, atmospheric light. The flesh tones harmonize with the greens and golds of the foliage, creating a seamless pastoral whole. His brushwork is looser in the landscape elements than in the figures, maintaining the hierarchy of attention that his academic training demanded.