One was the pride of Henry VIII's fleet of warships, the other was the favourite of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Yet both vessels suffered the ignominy of sinking in sight of land and in full view of an astonished public. She fuses religious imagery from the Renaissance and Baroque with the secular, urban landscape in which she lives. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998MARC QUINN: Quinn, 39, once shared a flat with Damien Hirst, but is a graduate of Cambridge University, not Goldsmiths. She became known as one of the bad girls of Brit Art, from her confrontational attitude and for her cheeky use of food to represent body parts - such as fried eggs for breasts.SAM TAYLOR-WOOD: Married to the influential dealer Jay Jopling, Taylor-Wood, 36, is a Goldsmiths College graduate who specialises in photography and film.

A study for his The Singing Butler made £90,000 at auction this yearSARAH LUCAS: Born in 1962 in London, the Goldsmiths graduate took part in Damien Hirst's ground-breaking show, Freeze, in 1988. His vivid landscapes are enormously popular though he claims to have faced snobbery from the art marketJACK VETTRIANO: Born in Scotland to Italian parents, Vettriano, 47, left school at 16. He is self-taught as an artist and has achieved huge commercial success with his romantic works. After her first exhibition, her works were reproduced as prints and greetings cards but she won critical appreciation with a show at the Walker Art Gallery in LiverpoolMACKENZIE THORPE: A former steelworker who left school at 15 after struggling with dyslexia, Thorpe, 47, first achieved fame when William Hague, then Tory leader, chose one of his Yorkshire scenes for his Christmas card. "One of my main interests in drawing people is trying to come to grips with character instead. It may be quite a whimsical notion but I think that one's history is written across one's features".By coincidence, he was working on a female nude yesterday - a portrait of his girlfriend in a bathroom scene where he is in the foreground brushing his teeth."She's beautiful anyway, so I don't have to make any effort to make her beautiful But I'm more interested in achieving a kind of truth.

It is a very commonplace theme, it has a very domestic feel to it," he said.Mr Pearson Wright said he was always cautious of any position that was a reaction to something else, as appeared to be the case with the Society for the Appreciation of the Female Nude. But he added: "If, as an enterprise, this society helps to produce some interesting paintings that would certainly be a good thing."A spokesman for the Tate galleries disputed SAFN's description of its collection, stressing that it includes more than 1,000 female nudes ranging from the 16th to the 21st century."Tate Britain recently mounted an exhibition dedicated to the Victorian nude and a whole suite of galleries at Tate Modern is devoted to the development of this genre over the last 100 years," he said.The aesthetic divideBERYL COOK: Cook, 77, took up painting to show her son how to use watercolours and proved expert at depicting ordinary life. Idealised versions of the female form were less interesting than, for example, Gwen John's picture of a scrawny female nude which is in the Tate collection."I've never made any attempt to try to depict beauty in any way," he said. Victorians had beauty so we have to have ugliness and they had craft so we have to have anti-craft or rubbish, junk art," he said.Furthermore, while Hirst grabs the headlines, it is artists such as the self-taught Scot Jack Vettriano whom the public buys, even though he is despised by the cognoscenti as sentimental and trite.But Stuart Pearson Wright, a BP Portrait Prize winner whose previous commissions include a portrait of Prince Philip which outraged the belligerent royal, also stressed that, for his part, beauty was not the point of a painting. Sixty per cent said they would rather see beautiful female nudes.If the attitude seems conservative, it is true that the people behind the new venture appear as old British Establishment. There is a Rothschild (Oliver) and more than a smattering of titled worthies such as the Marquis Francois-Eudes de Louville de Toucy, an art dealer and caviar supplier.