WILLIAM ETTY. 
95 
pure, accurate and clear outline, the first essential, without it, 
the best colouring is almost a nonentity. 
He offered an annual premium of two guineas for a design 
for stained glass, and his brother, Captain Etty, also offered 
the same amount for “ the best drawing or painting in body 
colours, of the wild flowers, weeds, and grasses of an English 
hedge bottom, done accurately from the objects in arrangement 
as well as in detail.” In the lecture of 1838, Etty expressed 
himself very strongly on the wholesale destruction of the old 
buildings of York. He says, “ While one stone remains on 
another of old York I shall love her. But when such awful 
slices are carved out of her, I feel as Churchill said he felt 
when he had to alter his poems, 4 It is like cutting away my 
own flesh ! ’ ;; I have noticed a practice which I feel sure he 
would have deprecated, that of removing the tracery of the 
fan-lights over the street doors, and substituting a single pane 
of glass, which produces a very bare effect, though it may give 
more light. 
At the age of fifty-two we learn that the painter on his visit 
to York took lessons in perspective from Mr. Moore (the late 
Mr. Edwin Moore), and again in the following year. This 
branch of study had been somewhat neglected by him as by 
other artists, and his taking it up so late in the day is a fresh 
instance of his perseverance and humility, for his teacher was 
quite a young man. 
In 1836 there was an exhibition in York, at which some of 
Etty’s characteristic works were shown, two, Adam and Eve , 
and Mars, Venus, and Cupid appeared for the first time, and 
before the close he also sent The Family of the Forests, 
purchased by his friend, Mr. Harper, the architect of St. 
Peter’s School, for £50, and afterwards sold for Y350. Etty’s 
prices till quite late in life were very small, not till the last six 
or eight years of his life did he begin to reap the substantial 
reward of his labours which enabled him after repaying his 
brother, to lay by enough to secure his long wished-for home 
in York, whither he removed in 1848. Before that time he had 
paid more visits to the Continent, but it was not till 1840 that 
he was able to make his long-cherished pilgrimage to the land 
of Rubens, his best beloved master, whose works he had 
