Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/William Etty/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 09:58, 20 February 2016 [1].

William Etty[edit]

Nominator(s):  ‑ Iridescent 10:57, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
William Etty is something of a case study in changing fashions. A wildly wide-ranging and exceptionally gifted artist, he was once considered England's answer to Rubens and Titian, and the man who unified the diverging artistic traditions of English, Italian, French and Netherlandish art after generations of separate development owing to the French revolutionary wars. Unfortunately, he had the bad luck to die just before the great upheavals in European art and culture, and is nowadays remembered (somewhat unfairly) only as the man who brought pornography into the mainstream. His life is an interesting mix of contradictions—a poor northern boy who became an inveterate reactionary, a Francophile who hated France and the French, a devoutly religious man who made his living painting (in John Constable's words) "revel routs of satyrs and lady bums", a proud Yorkshireman who spent his entire adult life in London. This is a long article (although not unduly long—it wouldn't even make the top 150 in terms of size), but I don't think it's appropriate in this case to split it as the change in his style over time is an important part of the story.

Before any MOS purist complains, the placement of Andromeda looking out of the page is intentional; in art if she's not centred she's almost always depicted at the edge of the frame looking outwards. Likewise, I feel Holman Hunt's picture of Etty sketching works better with Etty looking out of the page, whatever MOS says to the contrary. ‑ Iridescent 10:57, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • Support with brief comments
    • There are several formatting details that are not as I would wish, and occasionally text was sandwiched between images and margins (aggravated no doubt by my use of zoom to make the text larger & spare my poor eyes). However, I will let others hash out all these formatting questions. I have only one question: why was Etty voted in as an RA in Feb but was not fully a member until Dec? [And speaking of Feb/Dec, it would make both me and MOS happy if you would put &nbps; between numerals and months such as 16 August or whatever]. Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 03:14, 9 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      • The RA's admissions system followed (and still does follow) the masterpiece system inherited from the mediaeval trade guilds. Election gives one the right to create a diploma work, and only once that diploma work is judged up to scratch (and gifted to the institution to which one's applying) does one actually get the title. Thus, Etty was elected in February 1828, but it's only when Sleeping Nymphs and Satyrs was completed, donated to the RA collection and deemed of decent quality that he actually got the certificate.
      • Regarding formatting, pretty much anything with left-aligned images is going to get a sandwiching problem at some screen widths and resolutions as things stand; as long as formatting doesn't disrupt the flow at typical sizes (between a smartphone and about 1400px width), and doesn't actually make the text unreadable at higher widths, I don't consider it an issue, although others may want to wade in. At some point in the future, the WMF are introducing a maximum text width with further screen width whitespaced (view BBC News in a wide window for an idea of how it will look), which should make the issue moot. I'm loath to remove images if at all possible; although this looks a little cluttered with images, they're carefully chosen to illustrate his changing style and the key points of his career, and there aren't any obvious ones to remove. ‑ Iridescent 10:17, 9 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        • Something about the masterpiece system could profitably be inserted into a well-cited footnote, it seems to me. Otherwise, my work is done here. ;-) Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 11:49, 9 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
          • How's that, which expands on the existing footnote to (hopefully) make it clearer what the purpose of a diploma work is? ‑ Iridescent 12:32, 9 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • A huge undertaking taken on with skill and taste; have now read most of it, with little inclination or need to ce. My impression is: Wow. Support. Ceoil (talk) 02:39, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments
  • I bridled somewhat to see Reynolds' portrait of the Prince in Wales looking unusually puddingy used as a representative example of his work (even though I wrote parts of WWW's bio). Almost anything else would be better.
    • Per the talkpage, I used that because I think Reynolds's painting of WWW ties in nicely with Etty's later work for the Williams-Wynns. I've no strong attachment to it if you want to substitute in something else. ‑ Iridescent 19:37, 20 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think the association of "the Torso of Michelangelo" with the Belvedere Torso is strong enough to link it in the text. I assumed it was that before reading the note, as M's near-obsession with it was well-known. But whatever.
    • It's likely the "Torso of Michelangelo" was the Belvedere Torso, but there's enough doubt that I'm reluctant to state it as fact. Farr explicitly says that while the BT is the most likely candidate, there's also a possibility it referred to the River God model, or even to a partial cast of David. ‑ Iridescent 19:37, 20 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • A Sketch from One of Gray's Odes (Youth on the Prow) - work in a link to the poet in the note? (ok, linked later)
  • "the private Titians of that nobleman" - you might link to those that have articles in a note. Diana and Callisto and Diana and Actaeon etc.
    • In this context the actual works are less important than the fact they were seen as vaguely smutty, as the quote is clearly an insinuation that neither Etty's work nor Titian's was fit for public display. This is so footnote-heavy already, I'm reluctant to add more. ‑ Iridescent 19:37, 20 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • "a passage from Homer's Odyssey in which sailors resist the irresistible song of the Sirens" - not exactly!
    • A near enough approximation, surely? Anyone who wants the full story can click through to the articles on either the book or the painting. ‑ Iridescent 19:37, 20 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • "were thought by the English a uniquely Netherlandish form" - seems rather strong, whatever the source says; there must have been plenty of French and even Italian examples in English collections by then. "Mainly" for sure.
    • I agree; George Lance was already producing and exhibiting them in England, albeit with little impact. Changed to "primarily Netherlandish". Etty was the first major English artist until Sickert to treat still life as a significant genre in its own right, rather than a painting exercise. ‑ Iridescent 19:37, 20 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • hmm "public display in the cellars of the National Gallery" - "basement galleries", perhaps? In my book cellars have bare walls of brick or stone.
    • "Cellars" is what the NG themselves called the makeshift room under the staircase where the Vernon Collection was housed prior to 1850 (or The National Cellar-ius to Punch). Feel free to change to "basement" if you think it reads better. ‑ Iridescent 19:37, 20 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Ten or more years ago the Royal Academy had a (free) display of some 20-30+ of its Etty drawings and studies for several months. Might be worth mentioning.
    • I've found it impossible to find any sourcing, although I agree if it can be found it would probably be worth mentioning. The main narrative of that section - that the Tate exhibition in 2001 rescued Etty from being a curiosity confined to the Lady Lever/Anglesey Abbey bastions of kitsch in critics' minds, the publicity surrounding Sirens in 2010 prompted the press to start looking at him more closely, and the YAG retrospective rehabilited him back into respectability - is accurate, I think, but in an ideal world it would be nice to have more on where his works have been exhibited. (He was so prolific, and his works have historically been so cheap, that they tend to pop up in all kinds of unlikely collections.) ‑ Iridescent 19:37, 20 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Minor quibbles on a very fine piece. Johnbod (talk) 15:18, 18 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support My points adequately dealt with. The corner-stone of a fine series of articles, FAs & not. Johnbod (talk) 18:15, 11 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Source review
  • May I ask about the practice of stating page ranges in the Bibliography in addition to the footnotes? I note that you have done this in other articles but not in The Wrestlers. It's not an issue per se, but it seems a bit redundant.
  • I don't see any other issues. I suppose I had to raise some trivial question so as to feel I'm earning my keep. --Laser brain (talk) 01:16, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree about the page ranges, but on The Destroying Angel people were getting very het up about their absence, so from then on when I've cited a chapter as a separate work I've included the page range. The extra effort—and space—is marginal, and if people find it useful I don't see any reason not to include them, even though I personally also consider it redundancy. (My preference would be to treat a book as a single work and have the footnotes say "Jones in Smith, 1988"—I think treating each chapter as a separate work makes the bibliography look unnecessarily bloated—but recognize consensus is against me here.) I can see a use-case for including them, if people want to read a particular chapter on Google Books; for legal reasons Gbooks in the UK only lets one read a limited number of preview pages of copyrighted works before locking you out and telling you to buy the book, so it can be useful to know exactly where to start. ‑ Iridescent 17:12, 28 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Notes -- this is close to promotion but:
  • Looks like we still need an image review.
  • I'd expect to see a citation for the last sentence in Candaules.
Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 07:55, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Image Review
Support on Images All the images look good. Most are public domain and the ones that aren't are appropriately licensed on commons based on their original publication. Wugapodes (talk) 01:29, 18 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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