Nymphgate, Nudity, and Moral Excellence

In 2018, the artist Sonia Boyce removed John William Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) from the wall of Manchester Art Gallery. Journalists termed the controversy that accompanied the removal "Nymphgate." In this dispute over the ethics of the nude, the conflicting visions of Victorian critics regarding the relationship of the good to the beautiful recurred with surprising fidelity. This article draws on Uranian poetry, Victorian classical historiography, and quasi-medical inquiries into the origins of same-sex desire to contextualize Hylas and the Nymphs and to identify the aspects of the painting's iconography that the debate over its display tended to overlook.