17 Works, Today, February 23rd. is artist George Frederic Watts' day, his story, illustrated with footnotes #054

George Frederic Watts

A Story from Boccaccio

Oil paint on canvas

3658 × 8915 mm

Tate

When in Florence, Italy, Watts painted A Story from Boccaccio (c 1844–7), which shows one of the hundred tales from Boccaccio’s Decameron, a popular Florentine book from around 1350. These had long been a source for narrative paintings, and proved popular subjects for those in the Pre-Raphaelite movement too. More on this painting

George Frederick Watts

Sunset Over The Nile, c. 1886 - 1887

Watercolour

11 x 30 cm 

Private collection

George Frederic Watts OM RA (23 February 1817, in London – 1 July 1904) was a British painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical works, such as Hope (See below) and Love and Life (See below). These paintings were intended to form part of an epic symbolic cycle called the "House of Life", in which the emotions and aspirations of life would all be represented in a universal symbolic language.

George Frederic Watts and workshop  (1817–1904)

Hope, c. 1886

Oil on canvas

Height: 142.2 cm (55.9 in); Width: 111.8 cm (44 in)

Tate Britain

Traditionally the figure of Hope is identified by an anchor, but Watts was seeking a fresher, more original approach. He painted blind Hope seated on a globe and playing on a lyre which has all its strings broken except one. She bends her head to listen to the faint music, but her efforts appear forlorn; the overall atmosphere is one of sadness and desolation rather than hope. The picture’s sense of melancholy is enhanced by the soft brushwork and the translucent mists that envelop the floating globe. More on this painting

George Frederic Watts 1817–1904

Love and Death

Oil paint on canvas

2476 × 1168 mm

Tate

Large symbolic paintings about hope, life and love and death were popular with Victorian audiences. Watts produced many works on these themes. Here, the character of Love (on the right) is trying to defend the house of Life. Death (on the left) advances calmly with a bowed head. Death tramples the wild roses in its path, but doesn’t disturb the dove, associated with peace, on the bottom right. Watts described this painting as ‘the progress of the inevitable but not terrible Death, who partially but not completely overshadows Love’. More on this painting

George Frederick Watts Adam and Eve before the Temptation, c. 1896 Oil on canvas 65.3 x 38.3 cm Private collection	George Frederic Watts Eve Tempted, c. 1884 Oil paint on canvas 2578 × 1168 mm Tate	George Frederic Watts Eve Repentant, c.1865–97 Oil paint on canvas 2578 × 1168 mm Tate

The three paintings Watts called The Eve Trilogy that represent Eve’s ascension to life, her temptation and her grief after her downfall. The paintings were originally conceived as part of a vast epic scheme called The House of Life, but later took the form of three independent compositions. More on these paintings

Delicate in health and with his mother dying while he was still young, he was home-schooled by his father in a conservative interpretation of Christianity as well as via the classics such as the Iliad. The former put him off conventional religion for life, while the latter was a continual influence on his art. 

George Frederic Watts, O.M., R.A. 1817-1904

A Bacchante

Oil on canvas

92 by 71cm., 36 by 28in.

Private collection

A Bacchante shows Watts' continuing reference to classicism, even in his late carer. Here he depicts a semi-nude, draped female, and draws upon classical subject matter in the use of a Bacchante whose revels in honour of the god Dionysus are over.

The artist retained this work for his own collection, displaying it in the Little Holland House Gallery. He selected it as his only submission to an international exhibition in Venice in 1899, when interest in Symbolism was at its highest. More on this painting

He showed artistic promise very early, learning sculpture from the age of 10 with. He then enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy at the age of 18. He first exhibited at the Academy in 1837. He also began his portraiture career, receiving patronage from his close contemporary Alexander Constantine Ionides, who later came to be a close friend.

George Frederic Watts 1817–1904

Caractacus led in triumph through Rome

Drawing

Height: 178 millimetres, Width: 252 millimetres

British Museum

Study for the cartoon submitted by Watts in the competition for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament 1842-43. In 1843 Watts won the first prize of three hundred pounds in the first competition. The fresco was never executed and the fifteen-foot cartoon was cut up and sold (three parts are in the V&A). Portions were shown at the memorial exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1905. More on this Drawing

He came to the public eye with a drawing entitled Caractacus, which was entered for a competition to design murals for the new Houses of Parliament at Westminster in 1843. Watts won a first prize in the competition.

The prize from the Westminster competition funded a long visit to Italy from 1843 onwards, where Watts stayed and became friends with the British ambassador Henry Fox. While in Italy Watts began producing landscapes and was inspired by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel. 

George Frederic Watts (1817–1904)

Alfred Inciting the Saxons to Prevent the Landing of the Danes, c. 1846

Oil on canvas

H 342.9 x W 579.1 cm

Parliamentary Art Collection

Watts produced this canvas whilst in Italy after the announcement by the commissioners in 1846 of a competition for artists 'skilled in oil painting'. Watts depicts obvious allusions to Renaissance masters and was dubbed 'England's Michelangelo' however his only contribution to the interior decoration of the new palace of Westminster were this painting and a fresco of Saint George. An admirer of his work; John Ruskin made reference to this in a letter to a friend dated 1849; 'Do you know Watts? The man who is not employed on Houses of Parliament – to my mind the only real painter of history or thought we have in England.' Despite his fame, Watts remained an isolated figure within his profession. Towards the end of his life, 'The Art Journal' noted that 'he belongs to no school, and has had no followers, but stands apart, like some mountain peak, in lonely grandeur'. More on this painting

In 1847, while still in Italy, Watts entered a new competition for the Houses of Parliament with his image of Alfred the Great, Alfred Inciting the Saxons to Prevent the Landing of the Danes by Encountering them at Sea, on a patriotic subject but using Phidean inspiration. Leaving Florence in April 1847 for what was intended to be a brief return to London, he ended up staying. 

George Frederic Watts  (1817–1904)

Justice: A Hemicycle of Lawgivers

Fresco

45x40 ft

Great Hall, Lincoln’s Inn

The painting includes some two dozen named figures (including Moses, Pythagoras, Charlemagne, Justinian and Theodora and King Alfred the Great), and ten others, including monks, scribes, and a druid. For some of the figures, Watts made studies from his friends. Justinian was drawn from Sir William Vernon Harcourt, Alfred from Emma, Lady Lilford, and Minos from Lord Tennyson. The fresco took several years to paint, and was completed in 1859. It is a true fresco, painted on freshly laid plaster while it was still moist, and its maintenance has proved an on-going conservation concern. In the last hundred years it has had to be treated on a number of occasions, most recently in 1986. More on this painting

Back in Britain he produced a 45 ft by 40 ft fresco on the upper part of the east wall of the Great Hall of Lincoln's Inn entitled Justice, A Hemicycle of Lawgivers (completed 1859), inspired by Raphael's The School of Athens (See above).

George Frederic Watts  (1817–1904)

A Study for Una and the Red Cross

Oil on panel

Height: 36.8 cm (14.4 in); Width: 44.4 cm (17.4 in)

Private collection

The present work is one of three known versions Watts completed in the late 1860s.  The composition is inspired by a tale from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene in which the beautiful Una and the valiant Red Cross Knight join to defeat a terrible dragon.  On their journey the pair are overcome by a rain storm and attempt to take refuge in a dense wood where they are met by temptations which test their virtue.  The models for the work are Miss Mary Jackson (Mrs. Herbert Fisher) for the figure of Una and Mr. Arthur Prinsep for the knight. More on Una and the Red Cross

While living as tenant at Little Holland House, Watts's epic paintings were exhibited in Whitechapel, and he finally received a commission for the Houses of Parliament, completing his The Triumph of the Red Cross Knight (from The Faerie Queene) in 1852–53 (See above). He also took a short trip back to Italy in 1853 and with Charles Thomas Newton to excavate Halicarnassus in 1856–57, via Constantinople and the Greek islands.

George Frederic Watts, O.M., R.A. 1817-1904

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE

Oil on canvas

56 by 76cm., 22 by 30in.

Private collection

When the wood-nymph Eurydice was fatally bitten by a snake, her husband Orpheus, son of the Sun-god Apollo and the Muse Calliope, refused to accept her death and journeyed from his home in Thrace to the Underworld to regain her. After charming the deities Pluto and Proserpine with his beautiful music which had the power to tame wild beasts, Orpheus was permitted to lead Eurydice through the shadows back to the Earth. He was warned that he must not look back at her until they were in the daylight again. At the moment that they were about to emerge from Hades, Orpheus was consumed with temptation to see his wife and turned to see her disappear back into the darkness, losing her again and forever. This moment depicted in Watts dramatic painting. More on Orpheus and Eurydice

During the 1870s, as his work increasingly combined Classical traditions with a deliberately agitated and troubled surface, to suggest the dynamic energies of life and evolution, as well as the tentative and transitory qualities of life. These works formed part of a revised version of the House of Life, influenced by the ideas of Max Müller, the founder of comparative religion. Watts hoped to trace the evolving "mythologies of the races of the world" in a grand synthesis of spiritual ideas with modern science, especially Darwinian evolution.

George Frederic Watts  (1817–1904)

Mrs G. F. Watts (Mary Seton Fraser Tytler), c. 1887

Oil on canvas

I have no further description, at this time

In 1886, at the age of 69, Watts remarried, to Mary Fraser Tytler, a Scottish designer and potter, then aged 36. Mary had designed the Watts Mortuary Chapel, which Watts paid for; he also painted a version of The All-Pervading for the altar only three months before he died. 

George Frederic Watts (1817–1904)

Time, Death and Judgement, c. 1900

Oil on canvas

H 234.3 x W 167.6 cm

Tate

The painting depicts Time as a young man who walks with Death, who is a mother. Time faces forward to show nothing can deter him from his course, while Death holds flowers she has picked indiscriminately to represent that death can claim anyone. Behind them is Judgement, who is shown be impartial to who she judges by covering her eyes with her arm. The message is seen as universal as no one can escape Time, Death and Judgement. More on this painting

Many of his paintings are owned by Tate Britain – he donated 18 of his symbolic paintings to Tate in 1897, and three more in 1900. Some of these have been loaned to the Watts Gallery in recent years, and are on display there.

Refusing the baronetcy twice offered him by Queen Victoria, he was elected as an Academician to the Royal Academy in 1867 and accepted to be one of the original members of the new Order of Merit (OM) in 1902 – in his own words, on behalf of all English artists. 

George Frederic Watts (1817–1904)

Sower of the Systems, c. 1902

Oil on canvas

H 66 x W 53.3 cm

Watts Gallery – Artists' Village, Compton, Guildford, Surrey

The Sower of Systems (pictured below) was a 1902 painting by Victorian painter George Frederic Watts. Watts, a symbolist painter, would die two years later so The Sower of Systems would be one of his last. Sower of Systems is notable for its use of abstraction before the Impressionist and Expressionist movements which would precede the exploration into visual abstraction. Watt’s painting of God creating the world remains a heavily atmospheric painting depicting an obscure entity creating the galaxies and sowing the seeds of life across the darkness. More on the Sower of the Systems

In his late paintings, Watts's creative aspirations mutate into mystical images such as The Sower of the Systems (See above), in which Watts seems to anticipate abstract art. This painting depicts God as a barely visible shape in an energised pattern of stars and nebulae. 

He was also admired as a portrait painter. His portraits were of the most important men and women of the day, intended to form a "House of Fame". Many of these are now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. In his portraits Watts sought to create a tension between disciplined stability and the power of action. He was also notable for emphasising the signs of strain and wear on his sitter's faces. 

George Frederic Watts (1817–1904)

Mrs George Augustus Frederick Cavendish-Bentinck and her Children, exhibited 1860

Oil on canvas

H 127 x W 101.6 cm

Tate

Although best known as a painter, Watts was also a sculptor. 

The culmination of Watts's ambition in the field of public sculpture, his sculpture, Physical Energy, is an allegory of human vitality and humanity's ceaseless struggle for betterment; he said it was "a symbol of that restless physical impulse to seek the still unachieved in the domain of material things". It also embodied the artist's belief that access to great art would bring immense benefits to the country at large. More on George Frederic Watts

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