Four Girls by a Stream

Four young women gather beside a stream in this pastoral composition, painted around 1805. Etty frequently placed his nude and semi-nude figures in landscape settings that evoked classical Arcadia, though the lush greenery and soft light suggest the English countryside as much as ancient Greece. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford holds this painting, which demonstrates Etty's ambition to unite the figure painting tradition of Titian with the landscape poetry of Claude Lorrain.

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.