The next Gallery talk will be given by Professor John Roe, formerly Secretary of the Friends, on William Etty’s The Indian Girl and John Keats’s Endymion

John has provided this intoduction to his talk: “Etty’s painting with the title The Indian Girl has had an interesting and curious history prior to and following its acquisition by the Gallery in 1951. Doubtless because it is a rather voluptuous depiction of female nudity, it was attacked and slightly defaced in 1952, shortly after the gallery had acquired it. It has subsequently been kept from display. Another reason for not showing it is that its attribution to Etty has more recently become questionable. I am inclined to favour its authenticity, but I also have another reason for wishing to talk about it. In 1818 Keats published Endymion, a lengthy poem which tells of the myth of the goddess Cynthia loving the mortal Endymion. The love proves frustrating for Endymion (in Keats’s version of the legend) and he finds himself drawn for consolation to an Indian girl who is part of the company of Bacchus. Keats attempts to bring the sensuous and the spiritual together in a form of reconciliation, something which Etty insisted he always tried to do in his art. I see the painting (whether or not by Etty) as in part a testimony to Keats’s vision.”