Focus on this artwork and analyze the Painting.
The painting depicts six young men at Newporth Beach near Falmouth on a summer's day, in and about a rowing boat on the sea by the shoreline.  The painting shows no horizon, making the open-air space more enclosed and intimate.  Four of the subjects are naked: one swimming to the upper left, one resting on rocks to the lower left, one wading and holding the boat to the lower right, and one sitting on the side of the boat in the centre.  The two others are clothed: one standing in white trousers holding an oar at the rear of the boat, and one sitting in the boat with white hat and trousers and an eye-catching red top.The painting is ambiguous, and can be read in several ways: as a celebration of athletic masculinity; a representation of the innocence and purity of youth, unselfconscious in a natural setting; an image of a lost rural idyll; a depiction of the sons of empire; or (in the aftermath of the Boer War) as celebration of pleasure and an implicit criticism of the militarisation of youth.  Many commentators note Tuke's acquaintance with the Uranian movement and discern a homoerotic charge.
The title Ruby, Gold and Malachite – referring to the red, yellow and green tones used in the work – echo an essay by John Addington Symonds, and may refer back to the opening lines of a poem "The Sundew" published by Algernon Swinburne in 1866: "A little marsh-plant, yellow-green, // And pricked at lip with tender red".  The poem describes a lovers' tryst in marshland, witnessed by a sundew.  Swinburne's poem was the inspiration for Tuke's 1894 work, August Blue, the title of Tuke's painting being a quotation from the closing lines of the poem.
Tuke used several of his regular models for the work, including the brothers Richard and Georgie Fouracre, Bert White, Harry Cleave, and Charlie Mitchell (1885–1957, shown resting on the rocks in the lower left) who was Tuke's boatman for 30 years.  Tuke left Mitchell £1,000 in his will.
August Blue Ruby sundew John Addington Symonds Gold rural idyll Uranian Newporth Beach Malachite Algernon Swinburne homoerotic Falmouth naked Boer War