William ETTY (British, 1787-1849)
Portrait of a Man
Oil on paper, laid down on panel
10 x 8 inches (26.6 x 20.3 cm)
With various labels to reverse
Exhibited:
City of York Corporation Art Gallery, 1910, as A Man's Head, (property of T.W Bacon, Ramsden Hall, Billericay, Essex).

The seventh son of a Yorkshire baker, William Etty showed a precocious talent and was sent by a wealthy uncle to the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1806. The following year he was made a pupil of Thomas Lawrence, who became a great influence.
He travelled widely in Europe, working with Regnault in Paris for a year in 1816, but it was in Italy where he encountered the paintings of Titian and Veronese. He adopted their warm, rich colours and also the compositional rhythms of Rubens. Like his hero Titian, Etty would become a painter of great natural bravura and ambition. 
His career flourished from the 1820s and his large exhibition pieces of historical and biblical subjects were based on a large number of nude studies made in the life room at the Royal Academy.  The more prim Victorian critics accused him of indecency, but the nudes have remained a benchmark for sensuous paintings.
A very similar head of a man was exhibited as Head of a Cardinal at the Royal Academy in 1844, which suggests a similar date for the current picture.  Its rapid, painterly handling is typical of Etty at his best.