How does this artwork elucidate its Reception?
Etty exhibited the painting in February 1828 at the British Institution under the title of Venus Now Wakes, and Wakens Love. It immediately met with a storm of derision from critics for the style in which Venus was painted; one of the few positive reviews was that of The New Monthly Magazine, whose critic considered "the figure of Venus is delightfully drawn and most voluptuously coloured; and the way in which she awakens love, by ruffling the feathers of his wings, is exquisitely imagined and executed". The Times commented that "the drawing is free and flowing" and "the colouring, though rich, is perfectly natural", but felt that "the subject is, however, handled in a way entirely too luscious (we might, with great propriety, use a harsher term) for the public eye". The Literary Gazette conceded that the painting was "very attractive, especially in colour", but considered the painting's "voluptuousness" as "one of the most unpardonable sins against taste", and chided Etty's "careless" drawing, observing that "it is impossible that an artist who has for so many years, and so unremittingly, studied the living model, can err in that respect from want of knowledge". The Monthly Magazine complained of Venus's "sullen colour and corpulent shape", as well as Etty's "excessive exposure of [Venus's] figure". La Belle Assemblée, meanwhile, felt that Etty's representation of Venus "though a fine voluptuous woman, is not, either in supremacy of beauty, or according to any received description of the love-inspiring goddess, a Venus", and complained that "the colouring of the flesh is chalky".The harshest criticism came from an anonymous reviewer in The London Magazine:This small picture ... we utterly condemn, not for the nudity or indecency of which some have complained, but because there is a total want of beauty, grace, and expression, to clothe the nakedness and abstract the mind from it. Mr. Etty seems conscious of the coldness of his flesh-colour, and atones for it by the flabbiness of his figures. They are any thing but voluptuous or alluring. We would recommend to our artist to leave these small unfinished vignettes, these little doughy Rubenses as "toys of desperation" to others. His firm, broad, manly pencil, requires wider scope and a different subject.
An anonymous reviewer in the same publication later that year returned to the theme, chiding Etty for his imitation of foreign artists rather than attempting to develop a new and unique style of his own, observing that "we cannot imitate the voice or the actions of another, without exaggerating or caricaturing them", complaining that there is "[no] propriety in seeing the Venuses of Titian, the fables of heathenism, or the base occupations of Dutch boors, placed in parallel with those subjects which form the basis [of] all our future hopes", and observing that "surely, Rubens ought here [in England] to be held up as rock to avoid, not a light to follow".
The Literary Gazette Titian The Times The London Magazine Monthly Magazine The New Monthly Magazine La Belle Assemblée British Institution Rubens Venus