Henry Scott Tuke - Early Life

Early Life

Tuke was born at Lawrence Street York, into a prominent Quaker family. His brother William Samuel Tuke was born two years earlier in 1856. His father, Daniel Hack Tuke, a well-known medical doctor specialising in psychiatry, was a campaigner for humane treatment of the insane. His great-great-grandfather William Tuke had founded the Retreat at York, one of the first modern insane asylums, in 1796. His great-grandfather Henry Tuke, grandfather Samuel Tuke and uncle James Hack Tuke were also well-known social activists. The Tuke family's ancestry can be traced back to Sir Brian Tuke, who served as an adviser to King Henry VIII of England (replacing Sir Thomas More).

In 1859 the family moved to Falmouth in Cornwall where it was hoped the warmer climate would benefit Tuke's father, Daniel, who had developed symptoms of tuberculosis. Daniel survived there and lived on until he was 68. He established a small doctor's practice in his house in Wood Lane. His sister, Maria Sainsbury Tuke (1861–1947)—who wrote a biography of her brother after his death—was born there. William went on to study medicine but Henry—or Harry as he was called by the family, showed no interest in the profession. Tuke was encouraged to draw and paint from an early age. Tuke and his siblings were taught by a governess at home. Maria described their childhood in Falmouth as "a very happy and healthy one" and the long summer days spent on the beach and swimming in the sea had a lasting effect on Tuke and other enduring memories were the firm friendships the young Tuke formed.

In 1874 Tuke moved to London, where he enrolled in the Slade School of Art. It was in Falmouth that the young Tuke had been introduced to the pleasures of nude sea bathing, a habit he continued into old age. After graduating he travelled to Italy in 1880, and from 1881 to 1883 he lived in Paris, where he studied with the French history painter Jean-Paul Laurens and met the American painter John Singer Sargent (who was also a painter of male nudes, although this was little known in his lifetime).

During the 1880s Tuke also met Oscar Wilde and other prominent poets and writers such as John Addington Symonds, most of whom were homosexual (then usually called Uranian) and who celebrated the adolescent male. He wrote a "sonnet to youth" which was published anonymously in The Artist, and also contributed an essay to The Studio.