Tuke's paintings typically celebrate male beauty, young men who swim, dive, and lounge on a boat or on the beach as well as the artist's lifelong love of the sea, swimming, and sailing. Tuke settled in a Cornish town near Falmouth Bay in 1885.
He worked outside the mainstream of his contemporaries. During a time when smooth, concealed brushstrokes were in vogue, Tuke favored rough, visible brushstrokes. He excelled at combining this type of brushstroke with color to produce unusual lighting effects that stall the viewer's eye on the nude male body.
Although Tuke is best known today for his gently homoerotic paintings, in his own time he was also well known as a portraitist After a long illness, Tuke died at Falmouth in 1929