Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret

Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret is an oil painting on canvas by English artist William Etty, first exhibited in 1833 and now in Tate Britain.

Intended to illustrate the virtues of honour and chastity, it depicts a scene from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in which the female warrior Britomart slays the evil magician Busirane and frees his captive, the beautiful Amoret.

Despite being a depiction of an occult ritual, a violent death, a partly nude woman and strongly implied sexual torture, Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret was uncontroversial on its first exhibition in 1833 and was critically well received.

[6] After a year spent studying under renowned portrait painter Thomas Lawrence,[7] Etty returned to the Royal Academy, drawing at the life class and copying other paintings.

)[19] From 1832 onwards, needled by repeated attacks from the press, Etty remained a prominent painter of nudes but made conscious efforts to try to reflect moral lessons in his work.

[15][22] When he came to paint Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret Etty had created numerous scenes of combat and death, and would later achieve a degree of critical approbation when it became known that he visited mortuaries to sketch cadavers to ensure the accuracy of his depictions of bodies in varying stages of decomposition.

[24] Consequently, in Etty's work Amoret is depicted as physically unharmed by her ordeal, although his composition implies "sadistic torture and occult sexual sorcery".

[15][D] Alison Smith considers the composition of Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret a conscious effort on his part to praise the virtue of chastity by creating a "challenge for the presumably male viewer ... to vanquish lust and cast a pure gaze on vulnerable womanhood".

[15][29] In 1832, the exhibition of Etty's Youth on the Prow, and Pleasure at the Helm had led to significant criticism in some parts of the press for its use of nude figures, with The Morning Chronicle condemning it as an "indulgence of what we once hoped a classical, but which are now convinced, is a lascivious mind".

[22] Although it depicted a near-nude woman, a violent death, an occult ritual and the strong implication of sexual torture, critical coverage was overwhelmingly positive.

[33] The most effusive praise came from The Literary Gazette: Grace and beauty in the female form, spirited action in the knight, and fiend-like expression in the magician, unite with the splendid depth of effect produced by the architecture to render this, notwithstanding a slight tendency to blackness in some of the half-tints, one of Mr. Etty's "gems of art".Etty considered Britomart Redeems Faire Amoret one of his major works.