bushnstache: Artists - Part 1

I had a request to bring visual art into the blog—which I love, because it’s been there the whole time, just under the surface. Not all of these guys would’ve called themselves gay (and many couldn’t), but they were working the male nude in ways that feel… familiar. This first group, 1800s through the 1930s, are all painters—and just a small sample of a much bigger list. I’m pulling a few to show how this all starts to lean toward physique photography.

William Etty (1787–1849) was an English painter best known for his historical scenes filled with nude figures—something that raised more than a few eyebrows in his time. He worked within the traditions of classical art, but pushed boundaries by putting the male body front and center in a way that felt unusually direct for 19th-century England. You could say he helped crack the door open for what came later.

1. Academic Study of a Male Nude, Seen from Behind - William Etty

2. Self Portrait - William Etty (based on photo by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) was a Philadelphia-based realist—painter, photographer, teacher—the whole package, and one of the most important American artists of his time. He worked straight from life, often using the people around him as subjects, and got pulled into photography after seeing Muybridge’s motion studies, using the camera to break down the body in motion. That interest carried right into his male nudes, where the line between study and something more personal starts to blur. There’s still debate around his sexuality, but many scholars now acknowledge what feels pretty clear when you look closely—he had a strong interest in the male form, and wasn’t afraid to put it front and center.

3. The Swimming Hole - Thomas Eakins

4. Standing Male Nude - Thomas Eakins

5. Study in Human Motion - Thomas Eakins

6. Thomas Eakins

Henry Scott Tuke (1858–1929) was an English painter known for sunlit scenes of young men—often nude—by the sea. Trained at the Slade and connected to the Newlyn School, he balanced legitimacy and desire in a way that let his work exist in plain sight. Sailboats, shorelines, and boys on the edge of adulthood—there’s a softness there, but also something unmistakably intentional.

7. Ruby, Gold, and Malachite - Henry Scott Tuke

8. Henry Scott Tuke

9. Tuke with model

Eugène Jansson (1862–1915) started out painting moody blue cityscapes in Stockholm—so much so they called him “the blue painter.” But later in life, he shifted almost entirely to male nudes. That turn has led many to consider him Sweden’s first openly gay artist, or at least the first to make that desire visible in his work. A quiet pivot, but a meaningful one.

10. Naval Bathhouse - Eugene Jansson

11. Eugene Jansson

12. Jansson's models

Konstantin Somov (1869–1939) was a Russian painter and co-founder of the Mir iskusstva movement—refined, theatrical, all very proper on the surface. As a kid he preferred dolls and costume-making, which kind of tracks when you see how staged and stylized his work feels. In his private life, he had a longtime companion, Methodiy Lukyanov, and later became fixated on a young boxer he painted again and again—sometimes clothed, sometimes not. He couldn’t exactly spell it out in his time, but it’s there if you’re looking.