The Painter of Boys – Part 1

David and Joshua left London behind and headed south-west. It was something they did every year before the tourist masses descended upon Cornwall. They hired a car and stayed in a holiday cottage on the edge of Bodmin Moor. It formed part of a working farm and had once belonged to the Lanhydrock estate and, like so many great houses with dwindling fortunes, it had been sold off more than a century earlier. Now it belonged to a farming couple who had converted the redundant outbuildings into holiday accommodation.

David always wrote well in the Cornish countryside, where the only sounds came from sheep, cattle, and the wind crossing the moor. While Joshua slept until lunchtime, David sat at the kitchen table with his laptop and worked. Several of his novels had been conceived there, and he could easily write chapters at a stretch while new ideas arrived effortlessly. The spell would only be broken when Joshua eventually emerged, bleary-eyed and searching for his first caffeine fix of the day.

Joshua wandered into the room wearing only his underwear, his hair tousled and dark stubble shadowing his chin. This was David’s favourite version of him: unguarded, still carrying traces of boyishness, utterly unconcerned with how he looked.

“What are we doing today?” Joshua asked, as though David possessed the answer to everything.

But the plan had already been decided the night before: they were going to Falmouth.

Only in recent years had they fallen in love with the town. They had visited once before and been underwhelmed, but David’s growing fascination with Henry Scott Tuke had drawn them back, and gradually Falmouth had worked its charm upon them.

The story of Henry Scott Tuke fascinated David. For years he had encountered the paintings without consciously realising it. He had always been drawn to those bright, sunlit depictions of naked young men on beaches and boats. He had first noticed one in an art gallery and then began spotting others across the country. Tuke’s work seemed to exist everywhere now — reproduced on book covers, sold as canvas prints online, endlessly circulating through the internet. In death, he had become far more famous than he had ever been in life.

Once, David and Joshua had been fortunate enough to view The Tuke Collection in the archives of Falmouth Art Gallery. Together they examined more than two hundred canvases rarely seen by the public. That had been the moment Joshua fell in love with the paintings too.

Since then, David had tried to learn everything he could about Tuke and had managed to acquire almost every book written about him. He dreamed of owning an original Tuke painting one day, though even with his generous income he knew such a thing would forever remain beyond his reach.

It was nearly two in the afternoon by the time they arrived in Falmouth. After a brief visit to the art gallery, they were delighted to discover that one of Tuke’s paintings was on display: Study of Boys Bathing — two naked young men playing beside a dog.

“It’s a sign,” Joshua remarked, and David was inclined to agree.

But the real purpose of their visit was the grave.

Henry Scott Tuke lay buried in the oldest and highest part of Falmouth Cemetery. The cemetery had been laid out in the 1850s with sweeping views towards Swanpool Beach, where Tuke had lived. Now the place had become overgrown, its once-open vistas obscured by trees and tangled greenery.

David liked graveyards. They offered solitude and a place for reflection.

The early morning rain had given way to sunshine by the time they arrived. They passed a workman digging out an old grave who glanced at them with mild suspicion; few people carried flowers among these neglected plots anymore. These were the forgotten dead. Joshua had picked the wildflowers himself from a lane beside the farm that morning.

Tuke’s grave stood beneath the shadow of sycamore trees in a quiet corner of the cemetery. Joshua laid the flowers upon the flat stone and stepped back while David retrieved a folded piece of paper from his pocket. He began to read aloud. Nearby, the workman paused in his digging to listen to whatever strange ritual these two visitors were performing.

“Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig my grave and let me lie;
Glad did I live, and gladly die
And I lay me down with a will.

This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter, home from the hill.”

The lines came from Requiem, the famous short poem written by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson in 1880, and later used as his own epitaph.

If the dead were capable of hearing, then the words might have carried a certain familiarity. The same poem had been recited by Geoffrey Harrington Sainsbury, one of Tuke’s nephews, during the funeral in March 1929 — the same year David’s father had been born. The mourners had stood beside the open grave, lined with flowers and evergreen branches, while a cold easterly wind swept across the hillside.

David and Joshua knew their little performance beneath the spring sunshine might appear faintly ridiculous to anyone watching, yet somehow it felt like the only fitting tribute they could offer the artist.

“I suspect,” David said, “that not many people make pilgrimages like we do.”

At the back of his mind lingered the forthcoming exhibition of photographs by Wilhelm von Gloeden that he had agreed to help curate. Von Gloeden’s use of adolescent models had already provoked criticism in some circles. David realised some people might now interpret Tuke’s paintings in a similar way, yet he remained convinced that the work was unique — unlike anything else in British art.

“The problem,” he told Joshua, “is that people now see this work as intensely sexual. Tuke’s contemporaries saw something very different. To them, the naked young male body represented innocence — a celebration of youth and vitality. Lithe bodies in sunlight. Escapism. Pastoral beauty.”

Joshua had heard variations of this argument many times before.

“Look at it another way,” he replied. “The male nude has existed in European art since the Renaissance. All Tuke really did was revive that classical tradition.”

“The Victorians had no problem with it,” David said. “They regarded his paintings as healthy and life-affirming. But after his death the work fell out of fashion because his style suddenly seemed too traditional.”

David blamed the First World War. Afterwards, Tuke’s paintings must have appeared hopelessly rose-tinted — relics of a gentler and more innocent world.

“Do you think Tuke was gay?” Joshua asked.

“Without question,” David replied. “But you have to admire him for one thing: there was never a stain against his character. He had homosexual friends, some of whom were publicly disgraced, but nothing ever attached itself to him. Lucky old bastard — spending his life surrounded by beautiful young men.” He paused, glancing back towards the grave. “Did he sleep with his models? Did the paintings satisfy certain urges? We’ll never know. And we have his sister to thank for that.”

“What do you mean?”

“One of life’s great frustrations. If Tuke’s diaries had survived, they might have revealed everything. They would have made extraordinary reading.”

“What happened to them?”

“His sister commissioned a biography and handed over twelve volumes of diaries to the writer. Apparently the finished manuscript shocked her so badly that she refused to publish it. Imagine if it had survived somewhere — forgotten in an attic or archive.” David shook his head. “Instead, she burned almost all the diaries and wrote a sanitised version herself.”

Joshua listened while taking photographs of the grave and the wildflowers with his phone, already preparing the image he would upload to social media later.

“You know,” David continued, “I’d love to write a modern biography of Tuke. But I suspect everything we know about him has already been written. Unless…”

Joshua glanced up.

“Unless I could discover something entirely new. The more I think about it, the real story isn’t Tuke himself — it’s the boys he painted. Imagine being able to trace them. To discover what became of them after the sunlight and the boats and the summers were over.”