All Journal stories Sark's Sea Caves and Hidden Coast
The Sark JournalThe naked woman who helped put Sark on the map
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Before it was the Bath of Venus, it was Feeney鈥檚 Bath.
William Toplis had been shown the tidal pool below the cliffs of Little Sark by his friend Peregrine Feeney. Asked what he would call the picture, Toplis reportedly answered with his friend鈥檚 name.
Toplis first arrived on Sark in 1883. Born and trained in Sheffield, he spent most of the rest of his life on the island and made its cliffs, bays, caves and sea his great subject.
The pool below Little Sark occupied him for years.
The final oil took roughly twenty-five years to reach the form that was accepted by the Royal Academy in 1910. Earlier versions had been rejected. Across his career, eighteen of his works were exhibited at the Academy.
A surviving version shows a nude woman.
By then the name was not new.
In 1890, the Methodist minister and newspaper editor Nehemiah Curnock visited Sark carrying one of the new Kodak cameras. His account records the Venus Bath at low tide: a roughly circular basin of exceptionally clear water reached across weed-covered rocks. Nearby was another smaller pool known as Cupid鈥檚 Bath.
Toplis and the writer John Oxenham gave that coastline a much larger audience. Oxenham was the pen name of William Arthur Dunkerley. In 1907 Oxenham conceived The Book of Sark. It appeared the following year with twenty-one Toplis paintings, ten of which had previously been exhibited at the Royal Academy. Five hundred numbered copies were produced, signed by both men.
The Venus Pool appeared there too.
The 1910 Royal Academy painting brought the nude figure into the London exhibition world. Contemporary and later accounts certainly show the pool becoming a visitor sight. What the surviving evidence does not give us is a neat count of how many visitors came because of the painting.
The pool is real. The tide still fills and empties it. The rock still encloses the water. What Toplis changed was the way outsiders could imagine it before they arrived.
Today a visitor walks across Little Sark, leaves the main path and descends towards the coast. Around low tide the sea withdraws and the pool becomes distinct from the water beyond it. Later the tide covers the scene again.
The practical details belong in our guide to the Venus Pool. It is well worth a visit.
