Phaedria and Cymochles

Phaedria and Cymochles, painted around 1830 and now in the Princeton Art Museum, illustrates an episode from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene — the enchantress Phaedria and the dissolute knight Cymochles in the Bower of Bliss. Spenser's sixteenth-century epic poem, with its allegory of virtue and temptation, provided British painters with literary justification for depicting idealized nude figures in lush settings. Etty's warm, Venetian-influenced palette transforms Spenser's moral allegory into a celebration of sensuous beauty. The Princeton Art Museum, one of the finest university collections in America, houses this painting as part of its comprehensive survey of European art history.

Etty's luxuriant palette of warm flesh tones and rich greens creates a sensuous atmosphere appropriate to Spenser's enchanted garden. The fluent handling of paint and the careful modeling of the figures demonstrate his mastery of the nude.