and other remains of ancient architecture in the city; a visit or two to Belgium and France; two letters to the ‘Morning Herald’ (1836) on the protection of art by the state; a lecture (1838) on the ‘Importance of the Arts of Design,’ and another (1840) on English cathedrals; the establishment of a yearly exhibition and a school of design at York; an unsuccessful attempt at fresco-painting in the summer-house in the gardens of Buckingham Palace; a meeting between himself and his four brothers in 1844; a visit to Edinburgh, where he was invited to a banquet by the Scottish Academy, delivered an address to the students, and, with his brother Charles, founded two small prizes for original design, are the most extraordinary events of Etty's life from 1828 to 1846.
The number of pictures of all sizes which he produced in these years was very great. They were, like his previous pictures, nearly all poetical compositions, designed to display the beauty of the female form. At first he had thought to paint ‘Landscape.’ ‘The sky was so beautiful, and the effects of Light and Cloud. Afterwards, when I found that all the great painters of antiquity had become thus great through painting Great Actions, and the Human Form, I resolved to paint nothing else; and, finding God's most glorious work to be Woman, that all human beauty had been concentrated in her, I resolved to dedicate myself to painting,—not the Draper's or Milliner's work,—but God's more glorious work, more finely than ever had been done.’
His health had been long declining when, in October 1846, foreseeing the end, he left off the production of small pictures, and devoted himself entirely to the completion of his last large triad, the ‘Joan of Arc.’ He sold them easily for 2,500l., a large price in comparison with what he had obtained for his earlier and finer large pictures. They were separately exhibited in 1847, and though they showed signs of failing power, and drew more blame than praise from the press, they won much admiration from his brother artists and those who could appreciate their nobility of design and beauty of colour.
In 1848 his health compelled him to break his lifelong, but now dangerous, habit of attending the life school, and he retired to York, where he died in the following year on 13 Nov. He was buried with public honours in the churchyard of St. Olave's, near the ruin of St. Mary's Abbey, at York.
In his last years he reaped the fruit of his long devotion to art. His pictures fetched high prices. ‘It was said last week,’ he writes, in reference to a sale at Christie's, ‘Etty sells for more than Raphael.’ A few weeks before his death he came up to town to see the exhibition of his collected works at the Society of Arts, and enjoyed a triumph which seldom befalls an artist. In his last eight years he had accumulated a sum of 17,000l., and the contents of his studio sold for 5,000l. He left his niece his house at York and 200l. a year, and the rest of his property to his brother Walter, who died three months afterwards.
If we have none of his greatest pictures in our national collections in London, the galleries at Trafalgar Square and South Kensington contain a number of his minor works, which display to advantage his peculiar qualities as a painter, his rich and radiant colour, his exquisite flesh painting, and his grace of composition. One of these, ‘Youth on the Prow and Pleasure at the Helm,’ is one of the best and most characteristic of his more fanciful works.
[Art Union, December 1839; Art Journal, January 1849; Gilchrist's Life of Etty; Eclectic Review, vol. xxvi.; Redgrave's Century of Painters; Redgrave's Dict. of Artists; Cunningham's British Painters (Heaton); Pictures by William Etty, R.A.; Masterpieces of British Art.]
EUGENE [d. 618), Irish saint. [See Eoghan.]
EUGENIUS I–VIII, kings of Scotland according to the chronology ‘whereof Fordoun laid the plan which Boece finished and Buchanan ornamented’ (Innes, Critical Essay, p. 699), have now been placed in at least a more consistent system by reference to the older authorities and the more authentic though still largely conjectural history which Innes founded, Pinkerton, notwithstanding some errors, helped to rectify, and Mr. Skene has reconstructed with great ingenuity. The date of the crossing of the Dalriad Scots from Ireland to Scotland is now fixed, chiefly by the criticism of Innes, at the true epoch of Fergus Mor Mac Earc (c. 503), and the list of forty kings between a supposititious Fergus Mac Ferchard, alleged to have reigned as far back as three centuries before the Incarnation, falls to the ground, Eugenius I, Buchanan's thirty-ninth king, among the rest.
Eugenius II, Buchanan's forty-first king, a supposed son and successor of Fergus Mac Earc, is not mentioned in the earlier authorities according to which Fergus was succeeded by Dongard.
Eugenius III, Buchanan's forty-sixth king, said by him to have reigned 525–58 A.D., to have been the son of Congallius (Conal) and the successor of Goranus (Gabhran), is equally unknown to these authorities. Conal and Gabhran appear to have been real kings, but
