Musidora: The Bather ‘At the Doubtful Breeze Alarmed’

About Musidora: The Bather ‘At the Doubtful Breeze Alarmed’ in brief

Musidora: The Bather ‘At the Doubtful Breeze Alarmed’, is a name given to four nearly identical oil paintings on canvas by English artist William Etty. The paintings illustrate a scene from James Thomson’s 1727 poem Summer in which a young man accidentally sees a young woman bathing naked. The scene was popular with English artists as it was one of the few legitimate pretexts to paint nudes at a time when the display and distribution of nude imagery was suppressed. Other than minor differences in the background landscape, the four paintings are identical in composition. The first version was exhibited in 1843. Two versions are in public collections, one in Tate Britain and one in the Manchester Art Gallery; one of these was painted in 1844 and first exhibited in1846. A fourth version is of poorer quality and may be a later copy by a student. Musidora is likely to have influenced The Knight Errant by John Everett Millais, but other than that has had little influence on subsequent works. Etty was the first British artist to specialise in painting nudes, and many critics condemned his repeated depictions of female nudity as indecent. He died in 1849 and his work rapidly went out of fashion. At the same time, the topic of Musidoras itself became a cliche, and from the 1870s Thomson’s writings faded into obscurity. The Tate’s version of the painting was exhibitions in 2001–02 in London and in 2011–12 in York.

The original poem was published in 1727 and was republished in 1730 along with an altered form in Winter and Autumn. These accompanied the original painting on its original exhibit. Although the individual poems attracted little interest on their release, The Seasons proved critically successful once completed, and Thomson began to associate with important and influential political figures and figures. Joseph Haydn wrote a major oratorio based on the poem, based on The Seasons, which became extremely influential over the over the century following its release in 1744. In June 1744 Thomson published a drastically revised version of The Seasons which became an extremely influential book. The Seasons was published as The 1730 Winter and Winter, along with The 1744 Spring and Autumn Seasons, and an altered version of Winter and Spring in 1745 and 1746. The poem was initially published in Scotland and later published in the UK and the US. It was first published in June 1730, and was later republished along with Winter in 1830 and Autumn in 1845. The poems accompanied the Scottish Summer, which was originally published in. 1730 and 1745 in the US and the UK, and in 1746 in the U.S. It is not known which is the version that was painted at around the. same time; it’s not known if it is the same as the version exhibited in the Tate Britain exhibition of 1843 or 1846.