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BRITISH ARTISTS 
 
 WATTS 
 
 Edited by 8, C. KAINES SMITH, M.A. 
 
BRITISH ARTISTS 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 S. C. KAINES SMITH, M.A., M.B.E. 
 
 The ‘volumes at present arranged comprise the following, 
 here given in (approximately) chronological order. 
 
 Vol. 
 I. 
 
 Il. 
 
 III. 
 
 lV. 
 V. 
 
 VL. 
 
 XII. 
 XIII. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 XV. 
 
 The XVI. Century Painters. 
 With a note on the influ- 
 ence of Holbein. 
 
 Cornelius Johnson and 
 
 Jamesone, 
 Dobson and Walker. With 
 
 a note on the work of Van 
 Dyck in England. 
 
 Lely and Kneller. 
 
 J. Riley, Greenhill, J. M 
 Wright, and Mary Beale. 
 
 Thornhill, Dand- 
 ridge, and 
 Hudson, 
 
 Jervas, 
 Richardson, 
 
 . Hogarth. 
 
 Richard Wilson and Joseph 
 Farington. 
 
 - Reynolds. 
 . Gainsborough. 
 . Romney. 
 
 Wright of Derby. 
 
 Paul Sandby, Towne, Cozens. 
 With a note on the rise of 
 water-colour painting. 
 
 B. West, J. S. Copley, and 
 G. Stuart. With a note 
 on American painting in 
 the XVIII. Century. 
 
 Barker of Bath, and the 
 Bath Painters. 
 
 Vol. 
 XVI. 
 
 XVII. 
 XVIII. 
 XIX. 
 XX. 
 XXI. 
 XXII. 
 
 XXIII. 
 XXIV. 
 
 XXV. 
 XXVI. 
 XXVII. 
 
 XXVIII. 
 XXIX. 
 XXX. 
 XXXI. 
 XXXII. 
 
 XXXIII. 
 
 XXXIV. 
 XXXV. 
 XXXVI. 
 
 Kauffman, Bartolozzi, 
 and Zoffany. Witha 
 note on Foreign Mem- 
 bers of the Royal 
 Academy in 1768, 
 
 Downman and Dance. 
 Hoppner. 
 
 Opie and Cosway. 
 Raeburn. 
 
 Rowlandson. 
 
 Blake. 
 
 Morland and Ibbetson. 
 
 John (old) Crome. With 
 a note on the Norwich 
 School. 
 
 Lawrence. 
 
 James Ward. 
 
 Girtin and Bonington. 
 Constable. 
 
 Cotman. 
 
 Cox. 
 
 De Wint. 
 
 Copley Fielding. 
 
 Bewick and _ Clarkson 
 Stanfield. With a note 
 on the Newcastle group, 
 
 Turner. 
 Alfred Stevens. 
 Watts. 
 
 OTHERS IN PREPARATION. 
 

 
Uffizi Gallery 
 
 G. F. WATTS 
 
 (BY HIMSELF) 
 
 
 

 
 BRITISH ARTISTS 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 S.C. KAINES SMITH, m.a. 
 
 WATTS 
 ERNEST iL SHORT 
 
 Author of A History of Sculpture, Introduction 
 to World History, etc., etc. 
 
 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
 
 
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 fe 
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 ne ag SE 
 bs * ce 
 
 First Published in 1924. 
 
 f 
 
 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 IF the truth must be told, it was not altogether with 
 a light heart that I decided to include an essay on 
 G. F. Watts in this series ; for I must confess that 
 to me his work was always rather a sealed book. 
 
 I could see that there was in it a magnificent 
 confidence in the use of colour, but a somewhat 
 severe classical training had led me to be prejudiced 
 by certain aberrations of draughtsmanship, and in 
 his sculpture by certain eccentricities of modelling, 
 of which I had not grasped the personal significance. 
 
 In the following pages Mr. Short has so handled 
 his subject as to remove all doubts in my mind of 
 the permanent quality of the work of Watts. He 
 has made it plain that it means something, and 
 what is more, that it means something inseparable 
 from, and inevitable in, the nineteenth century. 
 
 Although the treatment of the theme differs 
 somewhat from that of other volumes in this series, 
 in its general outlines I feel that the departure is not 
 only justified, but necessitated by the character of 
 the work of which it treats. Although Watts was, 
 in intention, as firmly based upon the traditions 
 and achievements of his predecessors in his chosen 
 art as any painter that one can name at random, 
 there is at the same time in him an intentional, 
 I had almost said a self-conscious, mysticism, for 
 which the history of art afforded him no prototype ; 
 and it is perhaps singular that a man whose thoughts 
 
 Vv 
 
v1 Foreword 
 
 ran upon lines which compelled him to address the 
 many rather than the few, should have presented 
 to his sympathisers so intensely personal an appeal, 
 
 I am not pretending that even after reading this 
 book I can find, personally, all in his work which 
 Mr. Short would have me to see, but I can at least 
 be conscious that it is there, and that it is my fault 
 that I cannot findit. This is as much as to say that 
 Mr. Short’s interpretation of Watts is illuminating 
 and inspiring, and that it is as much critical and 
 analytic as it is sympathetic. Those who “ do not 
 like Watts ’”’ will find in it much to urge them to 
 reconsideration of their judgment, and thereby to a 
 better understanding of the point of view of those 
 of their fellow men to whom Watts is not only 
 intelligible, but a revelation of him and of themselves 
 to their inner understanding. The immense body 
 of work produced by the painter, and the lavishness 
 with which he placed it at the disposal of his nation, 
 make it difficult for any student of English painting 
 to plead ignorance of the man or of his gospel, and 
 it is to be hoped that in the many public galleries, 
 in which his paintings are to be studied, this little 
 book may prove to be of the same enlightening 
 service to those who stand before the delivery 
 of his message as it has been to me. 
 
 Leeds, 1924 S.C. EK. 8, 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 FOREWORD . ‘ ‘ ‘ . ;: Vv 
 PREFACE . : : “ ; Sie Et 
 
 CHAPTER I: BIOGRAPHICAL AND PERSONAL . I 
 
 Il: EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND 
 THEIR REACTION . « 32 
 
 a? 
 
 III: StyLE AND SUBJECTS - 66 
 
 ” 
 
 a) 
 
 IV: THE QUALITY OF THE ARTIST . 103 
 APPENDIX I: LIST oF PICTURES . ° e 143 
 
 ne II: BIBLIOGRAPHY é : ae? 8} 
 

 
CON Sy Ga ah Go 
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 . SELF-PorRTRAIT oF Watts (Uffizi Gallery) 
 
 Frontisfiece 
 
 Page 
 
 . STUDY FOR ‘‘ ASPIRATION ”’ : = 20 
 . THE CourT oF DEATH . ; , APG i 
 . SIR GALAHAD ; P : : pape 
 . Mammon : ; ; é ; cca 
 . ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE ‘ ; ow i>) 
 . BUILDING THE ARK ‘ : ‘ . Ioo 
 . DEATH THE MESSENGER (Study) ‘ ahah 
 
 7S et Ae by F. Hollyer, 9 Pembroke Square, 
 Kensington, W.) 
 
 1x 
 

 
PREFACE 
 
 Ir was Walter Crane who said that the painter 
 differs in nowise from the labourer; both are but 
 workmen moving coloured earth from one place to 
 another. This is true; nevertheless, if the act is 
 similar, the purpose is markedly different and wit- 
 nesses to human values of another and more en- 
 during order. The primary joys of art are not for 
 those who are content to regard painting or sculpture 
 as mystery craits. Rather, they are vouchsafed 
 to those who search with the naive joy and high 
 seriousness of the child at play. The art of the 
 _ world is the picture-book of humanity. Ever and 
 again a tome is put upon the shelves of Time, but 
 only that it may give place to another volume, in 
 which a new generation gives fresh expression to 
 the old-time joys and memories. Such a book was 
 in the making yesterday, and we are reopening it 
 at the pages filled by George Frederic Watts, in 
 the belief that they will throw light upon some of 
 the major problems of art to-day. 
 
 A Georgian who would debate the problems sug- 
 gested by the life-work of Watts must necessarily 
 run counter to much in modern criticism. It is 
 safe to exchange ideas upon craft, couched in the 
 jargon of Chelsea, but the fundamentals of life and 
 society, which seemed all important to Watts, are 
 
 xi 
 
xii Preface 
 
 taboo. Old-fashioned folk who dare the enchanted 
 woods of St. John and threaten its flourishing under- 
 growth, are faced by many who pride themselves 
 upon divorcing art from life and poetry. There are 
 artistic careers, whose primary interest lies in 
 the ingenuity of the craftsman; not so the life- 
 work of Watts. This can only be understood by 
 those who will relate the artist to the pulsing life 
 and thought of his age. 
 
 This man, who “ painted a queer sort of picture 
 about God and Creation,’’ is worth knowing for his 
 lovable self, but even more illuminating is the light 
 which his life and work shed upon modern painting. 
 There were times when a philosophy of art was not 
 required, in as much as philosophy and art were one. 
 Art was the expression of the All of Knowledge, 
 which is true philosophy, as it is among certain 
 happy tribes to this day. When the Pueblo Indian 
 tells how the sky-god passes across the heavens with 
 the blazing shield of the sun’s disc in his hand, and 
 vanishes, at last, beyond the portals of the dark 
 underworld where the spirits of the dead are at rest, 
 he is creating, at once, art, science and religion. 
 The faith which furnished driving force to the tale 
 as religion also gave it potency as art. To-day, this 
 primal faith is too often wanting. The following 
 Credo of Watts has a sadly old-fashioned ring :— 
 
 *‘ All beauty is the face of God. Therefore, 
 to make acquaintance with beauty, in and through 
 every form, is the cultivation of religious feeling. 
 This, while it is the noblest aspect of art, is also 
 
Preface xill 
 
 the most primitive. Nothing can be more im- 
 portant to remember than that, in the cultiva- 
 tion of the artistic perceptions, we are developing 
 one of the essential endowments of the human 
 creature—one in which the difference between 
 him and the lower creation is most distinctly 
 marked. It seems to me to be the duty of every- 
 one to answer to every such call.” 
 
 The weakening of faith in beauty and the God of 
 beauty has had far-reaching consequences. Artists 
 have tended to withdraw into their own craft in the 
 belief that this might be made all-sufficing. Art for 
 Art’s sake has been the cry. If the phrase only 
 voiced the artist’s respect for his tools, it would be 
 well. Pride in craft, and in the material of a craft 
 have made great thinkers and teachers from Phidias 
 to Da Vinci and Turner. But the phrase too often 
 denotes the artist’s carelessness as to subject matter 
 and his contempt for his patrons, the public. If 
 the painter demanded no remuneration, if like 
 Brabazon, he was content to wait for public recogni- 
 tion until seventy, this attitude of mind might be 
 justifiable. But we are constantly reminded that 
 an artist must live, and even that he requires a 
 considerable measure of material comfort; the 
 painter or sculptor of to-day is no longer an artisan ; 
 he is a professional man ; like the successful lawyer 
 or doctor, he would taste occasionally of the good 
 things of the world. Well and good. Paying 
 commissions, and the good things which paying 
 commissions bring, are not to be despised. * But 
 
XIV Preface 
 
 they are not for the artist who defiantly announces 
 that he works for art’s sake alone. Above all, they 
 are not for the spurners of the public, who, after all, 
 keep the professional man in comfort. 
 
 If the effect of current art theory upon the artist 
 has been serious, the effect upon the public has been 
 even more deplorable. Men and women stand before 
 a picture or a statue, put a pencil mark in their 
 shilling catalogues and pass on. They are afraid 
 to like; they are afraid to dislike. In other cases 
 the effect of the divorce of art from life shews itself 
 no less surely in the wrong sort of liking. At times 
 the more cultured section of the public make a very 
 real effort to understand and even to enjoy art. 
 Remembering the prevailing type of criticism, the 
 public attempt to take a craftsman’s interest in a 
 painting or a statue. Since prettiness stands con- 
 demned, ugliness becomes the new criterion. “ Well 
 painted ”’ or “‘ well modelled ”’ are the stock phrases 
 of appreciation. This is wrong. Craft is not the 
 concern of the public. A few hundred people in 
 London are competent to give a useful opinion upon 
 the technique of a painting ; a few score upon the 
 technical qualities of a marble or a bronze statue. 
 Even an artist is only a good critic of technique 
 within the narrow limits of his own experience. 
 From the popular standpoint, the last and only test 
 of a great work of art is its vitality—material, mental 
 and spiritual. If a picture or a statue bears the 
 impress of a personality, if it has a living message, 
 it is good. If it is a dead thing, however well 
 painted or modelled, the public may safely ignore it, 
 
Preface XV 
 
 A picture, like poetry, is the blossom and fragrance 
 of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human 
 passions or emotions; it should bring into relief the 
 obscure aspects of Nature; it should recall the 
 beautiful things which the soul of man has lost; it 
 should embody man’s instinctive premonition of 
 beautiful things to come. As Watts knew well, the 
 abiding value and function of art is to translate the 
 thought of God. Art does this, or it does nothing. 
 A basis less sure may satisfy the painter who is 
 content with the applause of his particular claque, 
 but it will assuredly be valueless to everyone else. 
 The recovery of an ideal basis for art is essential to 
 counteract the regard for realistic representation 
 which is crowding the galleries of the twentieth 
 century with landscapes which reveal everything 
 except the God of Nature, and portraits which would 
 be life-like if only a soul were shining from within. 
 Upon such a foundation, however, it is possible to 
 formulate a philosophy of art which is fully satisfying, 
 and establish a real relation between art and the 
 unthinking, uncritical majority known as the 
 public. | 
 
 The interest and significance of George Frederic 
 Watts arise from the fact that he is the latest of 
 Britain’s poet-painters. In deed and word, his aim 
 was ever to identify his work with ‘ all that is good 
 and great in every creed and utterance, and with all 
 that is inspiring in every record of heroism, of 
 suffering, of effort and of achievement.’ Born in 
 1817 and dying in 1904 at eighty-seven, Watts lived 
 through the age when the blast furnace, the 
 
XV1 Preface 
 
 macadamized road, the locomotive and the steam- 
 ship were bringing modern democracy into being. 
 He was fourteen when Orator Hunt lifted the tri- 
 colour in South London and raised the cry, “‘ For 
 the West End.’’ Then came the Reform Bill. 
 First the lower middle class of Charles Dickens, to 
 which Watts himself belonged, were aroused ; later 
 came the opportunity of the masses in the large 
 towns. ‘“‘ They lifted up their heads towards the 
 sky. They filled their lungs with vital air. They 
 lived.” 
 
 As Watts watched the growth of democracy, he 
 saw the individual come within the grip of Mammon. 
 In an earlier age a man had been a craftsman with 
 the joys and interests of a craftsman. Watts saw 
 him become a cog in the wheel of a vast social 
 machine. In 1859, when the painter was forty- 
 two, a pair of boots were made by eighty-three 
 operations, the work of two men. To-day, they 
 are made by 120 operations performed by 113 men 
 and women. Seventy years ago there were shoe- 
 makers; to-day, there are vamp cutters, tip- 
 makers, second-row stitchers, counter buffers and 
 the rest. Efficiency has become the new idol, our 
 idol. Is it strange that Alfred Gilbert, an artist 
 and a lover of the beautiful to his heart’s core, 
 said :— 
 
 “* All over the world joy in beauty as an instinct 
 is coming to an end, crushed by the wheels. of 
 machinery and forgotten in the competition for 
 wealth, There was a time when temple, dwelling 
 
 
 
Preface xvii 
 
 house or workshop gave to any surroundings, 
 however beautiful, the additional beauty of 
 human interest; now our factories, our villas 
 and our cottages are sores upon the face of 
 Nature.” 
 
 Watts himself believed that environed by 
 mechanical work and trusting to machinery, the 
 majority of men had almost lost their powers of 
 observation. Standing in opposition to the sense 
 of beauty, form and arrangement, he regarded 
 machinery as a deadly foe to art. ‘‘ The rudest 
 handwork is never without unconscious beauty, 
 never without a something that belongs to life.’’ 
 Following such men as Watts and Gilbert, it is not 
 strange that many lovers of art have come to doubt 
 if painting or sculpture can longer give vital form 
 to the thoughts that are uppermost in thé world 
 to-day. Symonds used the fine image of the meteor 
 becoming luminous when it strikes upon the grosser 
 elements of the terrestrial sphere, suggesting that 
 the thoughts that art employs must needs immerse 
 themselves in the grosser atmosphere of sensuous- 
 ness before they are of value—for art. In a super- 
 refined and complex civilisation, the creative 
 impulses that make for art are apt to be replaced 
 by the spirit of investigation and criticism. The | 
 modern scholar insists that the beauty of Helen 
 was not the cause of the Trojan war, but rather 
 the blackmail levied by Priam on the Greek com- 
 merce in the Hellespont. Not only the past but 
 the passing worlds of nature and humanity present 
 
 B 
 
xviii Preface 
 
 themselves in a wholly new aspect. We see more, 
 much more, but, above all, we see in a new per- 
 spective. Says Pater, “to regard all things, all 
 principles of things, as inconstant modes or fashions 
 has more and more become the tendency of modern 
 thought.” Edward Caird, regarding the problem 
 from the material standpoint, wrote :—‘“‘ It is the 
 particular strength of the modern time that it has 
 reached a clear perception of the finite world as 
 finite ; that in science it is positive, ie. that it 
 takes particular facts for no more than they are ; 
 and that in practice it is unembarrassed by super- 
 stition—i.e.by the tendency to treat particular things 
 and persons as mysteriously sacred. The first 
 immediate awe and reverence which arose out of 
 the confusion of the divine with the human, the 
 ideal with the real, has passed away from the 
 world.” The artist and the poet, indeed, Caird 
 continued, still keep up the confusion. It is their 
 work to give 
 
 “To one brief moment caught from fleeting time 
 The appropriate calm of blest eternity.” 
 
 Nothing can be said against the analyst of modern 
 experience who distinguishes carefully and accur- 
 ately between the finite and the infinite in the 
 All of Knowledge. But what of the artist who 
 forgets that his job in the work-a-day world is to 
 recover, if only for a moment, the calm of blest 
 eternity ? The shattering of old-time beliefs has 
 robbed not a few of the faith upon which every 
 art effort of abiding worth has been raised. This 
 
 
 
Preface xix 
 
 in turn, has led to the abandonment of accepted 
 canons of craft, so that a new craft is being evolved 
 to express the emotional outpourings of the age 
 of machinery and science. Many pictures are the 
 manifest outcome of their maker’s obsession with 
 paint, rather than with life. Thought and feeling 
 are sacrificed to a rendering of tone values. From 
 Monet, our young men learnt to read Helmholtz 
 on Physiological Optics and the result has been a 
 reaction, not only against Academic “‘ finish ’’? and 
 colour, but against subject matter in pictures at all. 
 The New English Art Club is a centre where the 
 professors of the science of paint loom largely. 
 Fearful of the passions which run riot at the 
 Academy and the Salons, members of the New 
 English Art Club pride themselves upon their low 
 spirits. Their annual exhibition has been described 
 as a parade of pictorial sackcloth and ashes. The 
 exhibitors explain that the treatment of blacks 
 and greys calls for a more subtle colour sense than 
 the treatment of brilliant colours, a statement 
 which is often justified by paintings shewing a 
 subtle treatment of neutral tones. To be just, 
 many of them paint certain aspects of Nature 
 faithfully ; the ever changing sun-garment of day- 
 light and the grey shroud of evening are pictured 
 and pictured well; but imagination and poetry, 
 the things which make the craftsman an artist, 
 are sacrificed for the sake of carrying the science 
 of the rendering of light and tones a little further. 
 
 In Paris and elsewhere on the Continent the 
 science of painting is held to justify even wilder 
 
xx Preface 
 
 experiments. The Mosaic painters, under the 
 leadership of M. Signac, cover their canvases with 
 spots of primary colours violently contrasted, with 
 the object of representing the full glitter of sunlight. 
 The Geometrists divide up form as the Mosaic 
 painters divide up tone, their theory being that 
 there are geometrical masses latent in all real 
 objects. Certain pictures exhibited in a notorious 
 collection at the Grafton Galleries some years 
 ago (I hesitate to decide whether they were 
 portraits or landscapes), will be remembered. The 
 painters provided the puzzle-pieces from which the 
 visitor was required to construct his own Nature 
 and his own humanity. The Cubists took the 
 liberty ‘‘to move round the object painted, in 
 order to give thereof a concrete representation 
 composed of several successive aspects,”’ the result 
 being a series of solid cubes, generally grey or 
 brown, piled one upon another as though they were 
 children’s bricks. Post Impressionism is the end 
 of an art which banishes romance and takes its 
 stand upon science alone. With justice the pictures 
 of the Post Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries 
 in 1912 and similar exhibitions which followed when 
 it was found there was money in such follies, were 
 described as the handiwork of the Goths and Huns 
 of art whose frenzy took the form of diabolical 
 mockery, and who were content, if only they could 
 smash what Watts, in describing an exhibition by 
 the ultra-moderns of his own day, called “ the 
 righteousness of beauty, which belongs to the 
 bird’s song and the movement of the clouds.” 
 
Preface xxi 
 
 There are those who hold that the black destruc- 
 tion of Post Impressionism and allied cults is 
 necessary if a new beauty is to arise. They look 
 for a man of genius who will build upon the waste 
 revealed after the Cubist destroying angel has 
 breathed upon the world. But surely the function 
 of art is not to create another Universe, but to 
 translate the thoughts of God implicit in the world 
 in which we have our being. Art is a bringing into 
 relief of the obscure thought of Nature, as we may 
 know it here and now. Only those who despise life 
 and despise living will desire a shattering of the 
 old belief in beauty and the old-time expression of 
 this beauty by honest craftsmanship. Rightly 
 interpreted, the revelation of Darwin—the concep- 
 tion of a dynamic as opposed to a static origin of 
 things—is as godlike as the opening chapter of 
 ““ Genesis.”” In the past every fresh conception of 
 the universe has manifested itself in an art based 
 upon beauty and honest labour. The present will 
 not prove different. At the moment humanity is 
 stunned by the bewildering flood of new facts and 
 fresh hypotheses, but an artist-seer will yet arise 
 with the insight and courage to lay bare once more 
 the beating heart of things, to establish a harmony 
 between man and the All of Things, a harmony 
 which comes from the time when man and God 
 were one. 
 
 Certain problems of the post-war world are not 
 those of the nineteenth century, but one question 
 which troubled the clear sou] of Watts remains. 
 We would still see nature and humanity as they 
 
XXii Preface 
 
 appear to the all-seeing eye of the Shaper of Things. 
 Never ashamed to own to an ethical or religious 
 purpose, it was this very idea of art with a mission 
 which gave to Watts’s life’s work an element of 
 timelessness, which inspired reverence even when 
 it did not strike deep down into the public imagina- 
 tion. If the history of 19th century art had to 
 be written around a single personality, as the 
 history of the Elizabethan age might be written 
 around Shakespeare, no more significant figure 
 could be chosen than George Frederic Watts. 
 He stood sufficiently apart from his age to escape 
 the ephemeral. Yet the best thought and endeavour 
 of his time sound through his work like a dominant 
 theme, giving it unity and a fuller meaning. Watts 
 refused to content himself with imitating the 
 surface of things; feeling that art had an end more 
 sure than the satisfaction of sensuous instincts, he 
 was not ashamed to own to an ethical or religious 
 purpose. As he said :— 
 
 ““ My intention has not been so much to paint 
 pictures that will charm the eye as to suggest 
 great thoughts that will appeal to the imagination 
 and the heart, and kindle all that is best and 
 noblest in humanity—I teach great truths but 
 I do not dogmatise. On the contrary, I purposely 
 avoid all references to creeds and appeal to men 
 of all ages and every faith. I lead them to the 
 church door and then they can go in and see 
 God in their own way.” 
 
Preface xxiii 
 
 Or again :— 
 
 “* My aim as an artist was to be as a conscience 
 to my native land, to the world. The object in 
 my work has been to suggest, in the language 
 of art, modern thought in things ethical and 
 spiritual. I want to make art the servant of 
 religion by stimulating thought, high and noble.” 
 
 Such ideals had a recognised place in the 
 Victorian scheme of things, however strange they 
 may sound to-day. Those who urge they still 
 have power to heal and arm and plenish and sustain 
 will be told that their theories are but a revival of 
 the discredited ‘“‘ heresy of the didactic,’’ that they 
 are no more than a recrudescence of Taine’s “ art 
 for utility’s sake.’”’ Be that as it may, if for 
 “utility ’’ we substitute ‘‘ humanity,” a standpoint 
 is afforded from which the main circumstances in 
 Watts’s career may be viewed. He said, “‘ What 
 Michelangelo did for theology in the Sistine 
 chapel, it has been my object for long years to do 
 for humanitarianism.”’ ‘‘ Art for humanity’s sake ”’ 
 includes both the artist and those to whom he 
 appeals and has a spiritual aspiration which is 
 absent from the word utility. The phrase, there- 
 fore, shall serve as our touchstone for judging our 
 artist’s life and work. In so far as humanity 
 listened and understood, George Frederic Watts 
 will be justified. 
 

 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL AND PERSONAL. 
 
 LONDONER by birth, Watts was born 
 
 in Queen Street, Bryanston Square, on 
 February 23, 1817. He was brought upin a 
 home where Puritan influences were dominant 
 and, like Ruskin, had to emancipate himself 
 from the intellectual narrowness of the creed. 
 For many years, the boy associated every 
 Sunday with a preacher in a black gown who 
 told of the wrath to come. One of the stories 
 which made most impression upon his early 
 imagination concerned a man who neglected 
 to read his Bible on week-days. Taking the 
 book from his shelf one Sunday, the man 
 was struck dead. From childhood, too, 
 Watts was delicate. Violent headaches often 
 left him helpless for days. As a youth he 
 
 I 
 
2 Biographical and Personal 
 
 was liable to these prostrating attacks 
 almost every week. Mrs. Watts, his mother, 
 also an invalid, was a widow of about thirty 
 years of age when she married. George Watts 
 Senior was a man of some culture and 
 considerable ambition and a maker of 
 musical instruments by profession. There is 
 a portrait of him, from his son’s brush, 
 painted in 1836, suggesting the dreamer who 
 missed actual accomplishment. George 
 Frederic was the eldest son and the only 
 surviving child of the marriage. After his 
 mother’s death from consumption in 1826, 
 the boy was brought up by his step-sisters. 
 Ill-health prevented Watts attending school 
 regularly, but he early became a reader and 
 soon mastered the few books in his father’s 
 house. In particular, he read, re-read and 
 read again Homer’s Iliad. Scott’s novels 
 were other favourites. On Sunday, the 
 
 family reading was confined to the Bible and 
 
Boyhood 3 
 
 “ Pilgrim’s Progress.” Able to use a pencil 
 from earliest childhood, the boy frequently 
 copied the pictures from the family 
 Bible. 
 
 As has been said, Watts’s first home was in 
 Queen Street, Bryanston Square, near the 
 Marble Arch and to the east of Edgware 
 Road. After his mother’s death, when the 
 boy was nine, the family moved to Star 
 Street, Marylebone. Later they lived in 
 Roberts Road, Hampstead Road. At that 
 time there were still fields with flowers 
 that fed the imagination of the young artist. 
 Watts was a Cockney as Keats, Blake and 
 Turner were Cockneys, but Cockneys of a 
 city which was still in touch with country 
 sights and sounds. Always George Watts 
 had a love for birds. He tamed a sparrow so 
 that it perched on his head as he lay in bed, 
 and ate from his plate; he never forgot the 
 
 sorrow of its death. In shutting up his pet 
 
4 Biographical and Personal 
 
 for the night, the boy accidentally caught the 
 little head in the doorway. Unseen it had 
 popped out for a last “‘good-bye.’’ The pathos 
 of the outstretched wing in The Wounded 
 Heron, which was hung in the Academy of 
 1837, recalls the experience. Years later 
 Watts painted The Shuddering Angel, in 
 which he made his protest against the wanton 
 waste of bird life for the adornment of women, 
 and, still worse, the serving of skylarks and 
 other song birds as gastronomic delicacies at ~ 
 city banquets and restaurants. As Ralph 
 
 Hodgson sang :— 
 
 I saw with open eyes 
 Singing birds sweet 
 Sold in the shops 
 
 For the people to eat, 
 Sold in the shops of 
 Stupidity Street. 
 
 Watts’s earliest known pencil drawing is 
 a Sisyphus, made, perhaps, at the age of 
 
 seven. At eleven he could make an exact 
 
The Young Artist 5 
 
 copy of an etching, ‘ counting every line and 
 sharpening the chalk between every three or 
 ~four strokes,” as he recalled in later years, 
 A copy of an etching by J. H. Mortimer, 
 reproduced alongside the original in Mrs. 
 Watts’s “ Life,” fully justifies the claim. This 
 chalk drawing dates from 1831, when Watts 
 was thirteen. Very early he drifted into the 
 company of artists. William Behnes, Sculptor 
 in Ordinary to Queen Victoria, lived in the 
 Watts’s house and was an early friend of the 
 family. An even more direct intellectual 
 influence was Charles, a crippled brother of 
 William Behnes. A friend of Charles Behnes, 
 a miniature painter, gave Watts his first 
 lesson in the use of oil colour. The copy of 
 a picture by Sir Peter Lely, dating from this 
 time, can be seen at Compton, Surrey. 
 
 These proofs of technical skill persuaded 
 Mr. George Watts to take a selection of his 
 boy’s drawings to Sir Martin Archer Shee, 
 
6 Biographical and Personal 
 
 then President of the Royal Academy. Sir 
 Martin’s verdict was “I can see no reason 
 why your son should take up the profession 
 of art.’”’ Mr. Watts, however, disregarded 
 the implied advice and George Frederic went 
 on with his studies. By sixteen, he could 
 undertake small portrait commissions, some- 
 times in pencil, and sometimes in coloured 
 chalks, receiving 5s. apiece for the drawings. 
 In 1835, he attended the Academy Antique 
 School for a few weeks but soon decided that 
 the teaching there could do him no good. 
 Two years later he exhibited his first work 
 at the Academy Summer Exhibition, The 
 Wounded Heron. 
 
 Among Watts’s early patrons none was 
 more generous than Mr. Constantine lonides, 
 a wealthy Greek merchant in the City of 
 London, whose flair for the good things in art 
 was transmitted to his sons and has found 
 
 tangible expression in the Ionides Collection, 
 
Early Patrons 7 
 
 bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert 
 Museum by Mr. C. A. Ionides. Watts 
 painted several members of the [Ionides 
 family in the late ’thirties and early ’forties, 
 including a group with Mr. Luke Ionides, 
 as a small boy in Greek costume. In 1839, 
 Watts painted a portrait which he sold for 
 £20. The purchaser sent £25. With charac- 
 teristic scrupulousness, Watts insisted upon 
 throwing in a portrait of the baby. 
 
 The painter has told us the secret of these 
 early professional successes. He was deter- 
 mined to do the very best possible ; he had 
 no hopes of making a name; nor did he 
 think much about climbing to the top of the 
 tree ; he merely set himself to do the utmost 
 he could, and, added the painter “I think 
 I may say I have never relaxed.”’ He trained 
 himself to rise with the sun. There were 
 difficulties at first, but he overcame them by 
 
 not going tobedatall. Instead of undressing 
 
8 Biographical and Personal 
 
 Watts rolled himself in a thick dressing-gown 
 and lay on the floor of his studio, sometimes 
 on two chairs, until he had taught himself to 
 get up with the sun. Once gained, the habit 
 was fixed for life. At 88 Watts still rose at 
 dawn. When he was ill and obliged to 
 remain in bed he asked to have the curtains 
 and blinds closed, explaining, “1 cannot 
 - bear it, the light calls to me.” 
 
 If the story of Watts’s life tells much of 
 toil, there is no less about the joy of effort. 
 ““ How happy we are to have work at which 
 we can worship all the time.” But it was the 
 necessity for constant effort which Watts 
 never tired of recalling, not only by his 
 example but in his table talk: “ The artist 
 must bring to his work the ardour of the 
 young lover or the missionary. If he is 
 satisfied with a few hours’ hard work—no 
 matter how hard—and can throw thought 
 
 of it aside and say he has done enough for 
 
Greek Influences 9 
 
 the day; not for him will be a place on the 
 highest level for all time.” 
 
 ““ Remember the daisies,’ he once said. 
 
 Throughout his ’prentice-years Watts 
 maintained his interest in books. After a 
 day’s work he used to go to the studio in 
 Osnaburgh Street (it was later occupied by 
 Lord Leighton and Sir Thomas Brock) to 
 talk with Charles Behnes upon Shakespeare, 
 Virgil, Ossian and the well-loved Homer. 
 He read the Iliad and the Odyssey until 
 the gods and heroes became his familiar 
 friends. 
 
 In the ‘thirties the Elgin marbles were 
 less understood than they are now. After 
 an enquiry by a select Committee of the 
 House of Commons they were purchased 
 by the State in 1816. The collection con- 
 sisted of sculptures and architectural frag- 
 ments from the Parthenon, the Erectheion 
 
 and other Athenian buildings; casts from 
 C 
 
age) Biographical and Personal 
 
 the Parthenon, the Theseion and the Monu- 
 ment of Lysicrates; a large number of 
 Greek reliefs and many drawings and plans. 
 Earlier still the British Museum had acquired 
 the Towneley marbles and a few years later 
 the bronzes and portrait busts collected by 
 Richard Payne Knight. When Watts was 
 a student the national collection of Greek 
 sculpture was not materially different from 
 that of to-day. Until 1847 the marbles were 
 shown in a special wing at Montague House. 
 It was here that the youthful Watts came 
 to understand the fervour of the Greeks’ 
 search for physical beauty and their ever- 
 present determination to make art uphold a 
 strenuous moral ideal, an ideal based in no 
 small measure upon the harmony, fitness, 
 and proportion which they embodied in their 
 art. From the Elgin marbles he also learnt 
 that the human form itself is an entire 
 
 medium of spiritual expression and that 
 
~~“ Caractacus’”’ II 
 
 human thoughts must take human form if 
 
 they are to make their due appeal. . 
 When twenty-five years of age Watts came 
 
 under the influence of the second great effort 
 in Western art, namely the art of medieval 
 Italy. In 1842, the commissioners in charge 
 of the decoration of the newly-built Parlia- 
 ment House advertised a competition for 
 decorative cartoons, not less than ten or more 
 than fifteen feet long, to be made in chalk or 
 charcoal without colour, the subjects being 
 drawn from English history, or such poets 
 as Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. In 
 June, 1843, 140 cartoons were exhibited in 
 Westminster Hall. To his great surprise 
 Watts secured one of the three first prizes, 
 with a design picturing Caractacus led in 
 triumph through the streets of Rome. Three 
 fragments of the cartoon have been preserved 
 and were presented to the Victoria and 
 Albert Museum by Lord Northbourne. The 
 
12 Biographical and Personal 
 
 other winners of first prizes were Edward 
 Armitage and Charles West Cope. Carac- 
 tacus never went beyond the cartoon stage 
 and even this was so damaged by some 
 process of steaming, which the designer 
 thought would “fix” the drawing, that 
 Watts had serious doubt about entering it 
 for the competition. The abiding good 
 which came from Watts’s success was his 
 first Italian tour. In the end this occupied 
 the years 1843 to 1847, and resulted in the 
 meeting with Lord and Lady Holland which 
 was to have such decisive consequences upon 
 Watts’s career. After spending a few months 
 in France with Edward Armitage, Watts 
 went on to Italy, where he was introduced to 
 Lord Holland, then British Minister at 
 the Grand Ducal Court in Florence. For 
 three years Watts lived with Lord and Lady 
 Holland, meeting the minister’s friends and 
 
 travelling with his patron through the various 
 
Life in Florence 13 
 
 art centres. In Florence, Watts painted 
 the vast picture from the “ Decameron,” 
 once in the Cosmopolitan Club, now in the 
 Tate Gallery. As to material success, no 
 young artist could have desired a better 
 introduction to his profession. In 1846, 
 writing from Lord Holland’s Medicean villa 
 
 at Careggi to Mr. Ionides, his earliest patron, 
 Watts said: 
 
 “Tf I have not made money, it has been my own 
 fault. With the connection I have made, if I 
 applied myself to portrait painting, I might carry 
 all before me; but it has always been my ambition 
 to tread in the steps of the old masters, and to 
 endeavour, as far as my poor talents would permit, 
 to emulate their greatness. Nor has the sight of 
 their great works diminished my ardour; this 
 cannot be done by painting portraits. Cannot you 
 give me a commission to paint a picture to send to 
 Greece? ... Take advantage of my enthusiasm 
 now ; I will paint you an acre of canvas for little 
 more than the cost of the material.”’ 
 
 The individualistic influences in Florentine 
 art did not affect Watts ina marked degree ; 
 
14 - Butographical and Personal 
 
 he learnt more from the Venetian painters, 
 than from the Florentines, Michelangelo 
 excepted. In Venice, a system of civic rule 
 scarcely less dominating than that in Athens 
 kept the individual in check; the Venetian 
 artist was forced to express the communal 
 ideals of his City-state ; an influence which 
 tended to strengthen the predisposition 
 Watts had acquired from the Parthenon 
 marbles and from those hours in the 
 Osnaburgh Street studio under the spell of 
 Homer. Letters exchanged with Ruskin in 
 the early ’sixties suggest that Watts was, 
 at that time, an earnest student of Titian’s 
 methods. Not that there was direct copying, 
 but the young Englishman discovered a 
 certain kinship in spirit which, for a time, 
 made him see with the eyes of the great 
 Venetians. He said: “ If I could carry out 
 my own feeling perfectly, my picture would 
 
 be solemn and monumental in character, 
 
Influence of Venice 15 
 
 noble and beautiful in form and rich in 
 colour ; but the subtle varieties of sunlight 
 I should never aim at producing. I can see 
 in Nature what Turner saw, and can appre- 
 ciate the excellence of his imitation, but my 
 natural tendency is to see Nature with such 
 eyes as Giorgione and Titian had. I see 
 only with their eyes, but do not work with 
 their brains or hands. Alas!” 
 
 No less potent than the example of the 
 great Venetians was the influence which 
 Italy exerted upon Watts through the in- 
 toxicating blue of the Florentine or Venetian 
 sky. Mr. Clausen has suggested that in all 
 Mr. Watts’s pictures, whether it is actually 
 expressed in the work or not, the blue of the 
 sky is a determining factor, so that there is, 
 as it were, reflected back from his pictures 
 a sense of harmony with the great elemental 
 things of Nature. Watts himself admitted 
 
 that, so far as colour is concerned, every 
 
16 Biographical and Personal 
 
 great art must have for its religious basis 
 sun-worship. In as much as it is by the 
 sun’s influence that men live and move and 
 have their being, a picture cannot beauti- 
 fully suggest life unless it is pervaded (as 
 far as material pigment can effect such a 
 result) by the sun’s light. During a later 
 visit to Italy in 1853, Watts was no less 
 conscious that the full representation of the 
 glories of an Italian sky were beyond the 
 reach of his memory and imagination, though 
 at the moment of experiencing its beauty the 
 very arcana of Nature seemed revealed. 
 
 It is interesting to recall that the sense of 
 visualisation was not strongly developed in 
 Watts ; before he set to work upon a picture 
 he did not see the design distinctly. First, 
 he had a strong impression of the ideas he 
 wished to convey ; then he was conscious of a 
 certain nobility of outline in keeping with 
 
 the idea; the rest came as he worked out 
 
The Crafisman 17 
 
 his design on paper or on canvas. In general, 
 Watts followed the traditional method 
 whereby the design was primarily a matter 
 of form rather than the modern method in 
 which a picture is regarded as a colour pattern, 
 and the aim of the painter is to reveal the 
 decorative and emotional qualities of colour. 
 Hence the excellence of the black and white 
 reproductions of many of his works. For 
 Watts, the beautiful line was one which did 
 not return quickly into itself, being part of a 
 giant .curve. Henri Bergson has given a 
 hint regarding the significance of the curve 
 in art which allies Watts’s preference with 
 his life-long pre-occupation with the per- 
 manent, rather than with the evanescent, in 
 human experience. For Bergson, curves are 
 more graceful than broken lines because, 
 while a curved line changes its direction at 
 every moment, every new direction is indi- 
 
 cated in the preceding one. So _ the 
 
18 Biographical and Personal 
 
 perception of ease in motion passes over into 
 the pleasure of holding the future in the 
 present. Grace implies ease, and ease sug- 
 gests the movement which, in turn, prepares 
 the way for further movement. Of Watts’s 
 technical treatment of the canvas, Mrs. 
 Barrington tells that, before beginning a 
 picture, Watts would often paint in some 
 body colour; opposed to the tone which he 
 intended the finished picture should have. 
 Watts dried out the oil from his colours by 
 putting them on blotting paper, reducing 
 them to the consistency of putty by washing 
 them in water. He liked his colours to be 
 nearly as dry as pastel. New brushes he 
 regarded as useless ; he wore them down to 
 little stiff pyramids of hair, shaped like the 
 stumps used for chalk drawing. When the 
 puttylike pigment was nearly dry, Watts 
 would take a paper knife, maybe, and rub 
 the touches of colour together; when the 
 
Little Holland House 19 
 
 surface was quite dry, he would work over 
 it yet again in an effort to get a ‘ bloom of 
 atmosphere into the painting.’ Watts was 
 an ingenious craftsman and playing with 
 paint was a continual delight. 
 
 Watts returned from Italy in 1847. Two 
 years later he met Mr. and Mrs. Thoby 
 Prinsep. Mrs. Prinsep nursed Watts through 
 a serious illness in 1850, and, early in the 
 following year, he went to live with them 
 at Little Holland House, a dower-house of 
 Lord Holland’s Kensington mansion. 
 
 “Watts,” said Mrs. Prinsep afterwards, 
 “came to stay three days; he stayed thirty 
 years,” an amusing, though not precisely 
 accurate, description of the household 
 arrangements between Watts and the Prinsep 
 family. 
 
 The Little Holland House circle provided 
 the last outstanding influence of the forma- 
 
 tive years of Watts’s career. Little Holland 
 
20 Biographical and Personal 
 
 House was an old-fashioned home, set in the _ 
 quiet of a farm which made it seem a score 
 of.miles from London. A circle of friends 
 soon gathered round the Prinseps and Watts, 
 including Mrs. Prinsep’s sister, Miss Virginia 
 Pattle, afterwards Lady Somers, of whom 
 her friends said that her smile lightened a 
 room. Tennyson, Rossetti, Burne-Jones 
 and Richard Deyle were constant visitors. 
 The youthful members of the Prinsep — 
 family became an ever-increasing interest 
 in Watts’s life. Arthur Prinsep was the 
 model for the Siy Galahad and Aspira- 
 tion. Val Prinsep, Arthur’s brother, 
 became a Royal Academician.. ra 
 
 When the Royal Commission of 1863 
 was making its enquiry into the constitution 
 and work of the Royal Academy, Watts 
 was an important witness and the minutes 
 of his evidence throw light upon many 
 
 problems which are still unsolved. Something 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 Compton Gallery 
 STUDY FOR ‘*‘ASPIRATION’ 
 
 G. F. WATTS 
 

 
Royal Academy al 
 
 has been done to remedy the defective 
 teaching in the Academy Schools against 
 which Watts protested. He urged the 
 necessity for studying the living model in 
 constant conjunction with the antique, the 
 method which has done so much to bring 
 students of the human form into contact 
 with the verities of sense-impressions and 
 _has resulted in the happy naturalism of the 
 best modern art, as compared with the 
 conventionalism of much mid-Victorian 
 painting and sculpture. Watts was insis- 
 tent, too, upon the Academy representing 
 all branches of artistic endeavour and that 
 students should be encouraged to study the 
 whole range of art. The man who practised 
 one branch of art could not be a really great 
 artist. Watts wished the influence of the 
 Royal Academy of Arts to show itself in 
 street architecture, in furniture, in the 
 
 fashion of dress, and, indeed, in public 
 
22 Biographical and Personal 
 
 taste in general. In condemnation of 
 Academy methods, he recalled that the only 
 definite reform movement of his own time, 
 the Pre-Raphaelite, had met with opposition 
 rather than help from the members of the 
 Academy. The painting of wall-pictures 
 for the big public schools of our country, 
 and the display of art objects in public 
 buildings such as railway stations, were 
 also discussed with the Commissioners. 
 Above all, Watts was insistent upon the 
 need, not only for interesting the public, 
 but for using the public taste and knowledge 
 to counteract the narrowness of a purely 
 professional judgment upon art matters 
 and production. In 1863, and again in 1879, 
 when he wrote an interesting paper upon 
 the present condition of art in Britain for 
 the ‘‘Nineteenth Century,’”’ Watts was of 
 opinion that an Academy Exhibition room 
 
 was no place for a grave, deliberate work 
 
Grosvenor Gallery 23 
 
 of art. The considerations set out in earlier 
 pages would seem to suggest that it is not 
 a place for the highest art efforts to-day, 
 though much has been done since Watts 
 made his protests. Always practical in 
 his sympathies, Watts assisted Mr. Hallé 
 and Sir Coutts Lindsay to found the 
 Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, when Love and 
 Death was exhibited. Time, Death and 
 Judgment, Mischief, Ophelia, and Su 
 Galahad were shewn in the following year. 
 The avowed aim of the Grosvenor Gallery 
 was to give pictures during their brief 
 public life a fair chance of being seen at 
 their best. Each group of paintings was 
 separate. Each artist delivered his message 
 untroubled by conflicting voices. At the 
 annual exhibitions of the Grosvenor Gallery, 
 and still more when 200 of his works were 
 shewn during the winter of 1881-82, Watts 
 had an opportunity of making a really 
 
24 Biographical and Personal 
 
 effective appeal to those whom he sought 
 to influence by his art. 
 
 Among Watts’s pictures are two canvases 
 which recall a pathetic episode in the lives 
 of two great Victorians, The Sisters, and 
 the Ophelia exhibited in 1878. The Ophelia, 
 surely, is Ellen Terry to the life. 
 
 There is a willow grows aslant a brook, 
 That shows its hoar leaves on the glassy stream, 
 There with fantastic garlands did she come, 
 
 The Sisters are Kate and Ellen Terry, 
 the portrait of the younger girl being very 
 lovely. a 
 
 Mrs. Watts’s “‘ Annals of An Artist’s 
 Life”’ tell that a beautiful young girl, 
 who, with her yet undeveloped genius, was 
 destined to fascinate and delight thousands 
 of her generation, came into the painter’s 
 life, and that the two were married in 
 
 February, 1864, and were parted in June, 
 
Marriage 25 
 
 1865. Except for a chance meeting in the 
 streets of Brighton, George Frederic Watts 
 and Ellen Terry never met again. The 
 marriage was dissolved in 1877. 
 
 Watts married Miss Mary Fraser-Tytler, 
 his second wife, in 1886. A pupil of the 
 artist, she was to be the writer of the invalua- 
 able ‘ Annals of an Artist,”’ to which every 
 student of the painter must be in constant 
 debt. 
 
 Mrs. Watts gives more than one glimpse 
 of the life at Little Holland House in the 
 ’sixties and ’seventies. Joachim, bow in 
 hand and chin upon the violin, standing 
 in the middle of the studio, the art upon the 
 walls answering nobly to the music, and 
 Hallé at the piano. Mrs. Sartoris (Adelaide 
 Kemble), too, and possibly Lady Lilford, 
 Mrs. Norton and Lady Somers. Leighton 
 was almost always there, and sometimes 
 
 Herschel and Browning, besides politicians, 
 D 
 
26 Biographical and Personal 
 
 statesmen or soldiers, glad to abandon them- 
 selves to the joys of the arts in this best of 
 homes. 
 
 Not until 1867 was Watts elected an 
 associate of the Royal Academy ; in Decem- 
 ber of the same year he became a Royal 
 Academician, more than twenty years after 
 he had definitely embarked upon the life- 
 work which now finds its supreme expression 
 in the noble room at the Tate Gallery, and 
 the equally engaging ‘ Watts’s Room’ at the 
 National Portrait Gallery. The final honour 
 came when King Edward made the painter 
 an original member of the Order of Merit, 
 the best reward which the Crown of Britain 
 can bestow upon a man of thought or action 
 who, through a long life, has served his 
 country well. 
 
 Earlier Watts had declined the baronetcy 
 which Leighton and Millais accepted, an act 
 of modesty which was on a parity with his 
 
The Last Years 27 
 
 resolve in 1890 no longer to claim his exhibi- 
 tion rights as a Royal Academician. Watts 
 was then seventy-three, and feared that 
 with advancing years there might be some 
 declension in powers of craft. He asked, 
 therefore, that his work should be judged 
 each year on its merits, as though it came 
 from a painter outside the ranks of the 
 Academy. In fact, Watts continued to 
 exhibit for fourteen more years, his last 
 work being the charming portrait, Lilian, 
 the girl in the garden hat. The pictures of 
 the last decade had not the sureness of eye 
 and hand of the middle years, but the chief 
 difference was psychological. As with 
 Tennyson, a sense of fame and a knowledge 
 of his ever-growing influence increased the 
 painter’s sense of responsibility and tended 
 to detract from any lyric tendency there 
 may have been in his nature. Always Watts 
 
 had more of the high seriousness of the great 
 
28 Biographical and Personal 
 
 Victorians than the feeling for lyric rapture 
 which characterises other artists. Ever 
 mindful of his humble origin, though he 
 would gladly have forgotten it, Watts’s 
 desire to uplift the masses deepened with the 
 years, until the master became the preacher, 
 and the preacher the seer. 
 
 Watts’s most mature thought upon life 
 present and life to come is to be found in The 
 Court of Death, where Death is pictured as 
 the Mother of Humanity, summoning her 
 children to her at the last. It wasa favourite 
 idea of Watts to regard Death as a kindly 
 nurse who would say to her children, ‘ And 
 now, you must go to bed and you will wake 
 in the morning.’ The Court of Death, 
 which dominates the Watts Room in the 
 Tate Gallery, was designed in the ’sixties 
 for the mortuary chapel of a cemetery for 
 London paupers. Watts read somewhere of 
 a. proposal to build a chapel in order that 
 

 
 Tate Gallerv 
 
 bee GOURT: OF DEATH 
 G. F. WATTS 
 

 
“ Court of Death” 29 
 
 the coffins of pauper dead might be collected 
 in one place so that a single burial service 
 would suffice. The callousness of the proposal 
 touched the painter; he set to work to 
 consider how such a chapel might be made 
 beautiful with poetry, even if it was dis- 
 figured by the calculated materialism of 
 man. One thought which came to him was 
 this picture of the Mother of Life and Death 
 —and so the painter became preacher, and 
 the preacher seer. 
 
 Enthroned upon the ruins of the world, 
 with a child, the germ of human life, in her 
 lap, and behind her head the glow of Eternity. 
 On either side stand two angel figures— 
 Silence and Mystery—guarding the portals 
 of the Unknown. At the feet of the Death 
 Mother are gathered all conditions of men, 
 rendering their last homage to the Queen of 
 Things Created. The warrior in the pride 
 
 of strength and manhood, bowing his head, 
 
30 Biographical and Personal 
 
 renders his sword. The nobleman in crimson 
 and ermine cloak lays down his coronet. 
 A cripple craves respite from pain ; an aged 
 woman seeks release from poverty and 
 struggle. On the other side of the throne 
 a young girl, wearied with suffering, lays 
 her head as though in sleep upon a winding 
 sheet, while a little child, half in sport, 
 draws the shroud over his head. At the 
 feet of Death crouches the lion, a type of 
 physical strength. As Watts said—‘ Death 
 does not exact but receives homage.’’ Sickness 
 ‘lays her head upon the knee of Death; 
 old age comes for repose ; and, in the arms 
 of the silent figure on the throne, is the 
 youngest possible child, the very beginning 
 of Life being in the lap of Death. 
 
 A short time before his last illness Watts 
 said to his wife, “‘ I am glad I painted Death 
 with that white robe; it makes it an angel 
 and I often catch a glint of that white 
 
Watts’s Death 31 
 
 garment behind my shoulder and it seems to 
 me to say “Iam not far off.’’’ On June 4th, 
 1904, he was in the studio for the last time. 
 One morning he beckoned Miss Geraldine 
 Liddell and Mrs. Watts to come nearer, 
 and tried to put into words a vision that had 
 come to him. He had looked into the Book 
 of Creation and understood that the whole 
 could be comprehended. ‘“‘ A glorious state,” 
 he called it, and he ended, “‘ Now, I see that 
 great Book—I see that great Light.” On 
 Friday, the first of July, 1904, he died. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND THEIR 
 REACTION. 
 
 OT only the example of the Greeks — 
 and the Venetians, but his personal 
 conviction regarding the ultimate purpose 
 of art, impelled Watts to the creation of 
 works which would speak to his countrymen 
 as a whole. He dreamed of paintings which 
 would be as truly national as the lyrics the. 
 youth of Athens had chanted in chorus 
 during the feast of Dionysus, or the frieze 
 of the Parthenon itself. 
 Above the poverty-stricken strugglers, 
 who can do no more than keep body and 
 soul together, there is an ever-growing body 
 
 of potential art lovers, who claim no expert 
 32 
 
Art and the Public 33 
 
 knowledge, but welcome the insight which 
 a painter-poet can give them into nature, 
 life and conduct. These are the public, 
 the people, the nation, and they were the 
 men and women whom Watts had in mind 
 when he returned from Italy in 1847, 
 obsessed with a desire to revive and develop 
 fresco-painting in England. He failed, and 
 it is needful to ask why, as Watts said himself, 
 a life which might have been an epic proved 
 only a series of sonnets. In part, Watts’s 
 failure was due to the fact that he lived in 
 an age of ideas and emotions of exceptional 
 complexity. Titian had found it easy to 
 paint pictures of significance for his country- 
 men. He was only required to pass on his 
 impression of a few Biblical texts and legends, 
 or incidents in the history of his City-State. 
 The Venetian spectator knew as much as 
 the painter, but Watts had no assurance 
 
 that his public stood in any sort of relation 
 
34 External Influences 
 
 to his art and were, therefore, in a position 
 to understand his philosophy of life and 
 conduct. 
 
 Apart from these psychological considera- 
 tions there were certain professional circum- 
 stances which interfered with the free play 
 of Watts’s genius. These were concerned 
 with the condition under which his pictures 
 were produced and sold, and they have a 
 special interest to-day as the poet-painters, 
 of our own time suffer even more than Watts 
 did from the conditions under which their 
 wares are marketed. Watts failed to re- 
 establish fresco-painting in Britain, and his 
 life-work proved to be fragments rather than 
 a unified whole. Might not the result have 
 been different had Watts been a Frenchman, 
 living in a country where public commissions 
 for large decorative paintings and sculptured 
 memorials were common? Every year the 
 
 Salons display a number of large canvases 
 
Public Art in France 35 
 
 destined for Parisian and provincial town- 
 halls, or public buildings. Perhaps the 
 Basilica of Domrémy, for which M. Boutet 
 de Monvel exhibited three Joan of Arc panels 
 in a pre-war Salon ; maybe the Petit Palais, 
 for which M. Paul Besnard executed four 
 great panels, the fourth of which was shewn 
 at the Salon in 909. Or again, the Capitol 
 at Toulouse, for which M. Henri Martin has 
 designed the decorations. The list could 
 readily be extended twenty-fold. 
 
 What may be achieved by the French 
 system under favourable conditions can be 
 judged from the mural paintings of Puvis 
 de Chavannes at Amiens, at Marseilles, and 
 in the Panthéon, the Sorbonne and the Hétel 
 de Ville in Paris. 
 
 Of all the nineteenth century artists, 
 perhaps, Puvis de Chavannes bears the 
 closest kinship to Watts. Born in 1824, he 
 was nearly the same age as the great 
 
36 External Influences 
 
 Englishman. Like Watts, he was a man of 
 high culture. After two prolonged visits to 
 Italy he returned to France to be trained as 
 an artist. When the studio of Delacroix 
 proved as lacking in inspiration to him as the 
 Royal Academy was to Watts, de Chavannes 
 retired into solitude to work out his problem 
 alone. To Gautier, that prince among 
 critics, belongs the honour of first seeing in 
 the young painter the decorator of palaces 
 and of monumental buildings. Gautier said, 
 ““Puvis de Chavannes is not a painter of 
 the ordinary type of picture. He needs 
 no easel, but scaffolding and a vast expanse 
 of wall.” 
 
 In 1861, when he was thirty-seven years 
 of age, Puvis sold his first pictures. They 
 were bought by the City of Amiens. The 
 sale so overjoyed him that (again how like 
 Watts) Puvis insisted upon giving the other 
 
 pictures of the series and even offered two 
 
Puvis de Chavannes 37 
 
 extra ones to complete the scheme. In 1865, 
 Amiens gave de Chavannes a commission 
 for the Ave Picardia Nutrix and the Ludus 
 pro Patria. To-day, Amiens is remem- 
 bered for its Cathedral, the Gothic Parthenon, 
 and for the pictures of Puvis de Chavannes. 
 In 1867 came a commission for the paintings 
 on the staircase of the Museum at Marseilles 
 and, in 1874, the order for the decoration of 
 the Hdtel de Ville of Poictiers. In 1876, 
 Puvis commenced the cycle of pictures 
 covering the life of St. Genevieve for the 
 Panthéon in Paris. Later came the noble 
 painting in the grand amphitheatre at the 
 Sorbonne and the series for the Hétel de Ville 
 at Paris, the Summer, the Winter and the 
 Victor Hugo. 
 
 In one and all we can feel a man of the 
 temper of Watts. Some of the sayings of 
 de Chavannes, indeed, sound like the table 
 
 talk of his English contemporary. 
 
38 External Influences 
 
 ‘‘ Nature !| they say that I ignore her. But they 
 fail to understand that I do not copy Nature! I 
 draw my inspiration from her.” 
 
 ‘One must try to paint subjects taken from real 
 life, but they must have a general application.” 
 
 Or yet again :— 
 
 “Take from Nature everything that is accidental, 
 everything that for the moment is ineffective. Art 
 completes what Nature only sketched. One makes 
 Nature articulate by simplification. Express the 
 outstanding facts and leave out therest. This is the 
 secret of design and even of eloquence and wit.” 
 
 Puvis de Chavannes was painting the 
 story of St. Genevieve at the time of his 
 death, his theme being the Old-age of 
 St. Genevieve, the patron saint of his well- 
 loved city, the sweet influence who had 
 banished Paganism from Paris. He shewed 
 her stepping from her cell on to the balcony 
 of the convent and looking over the sleeping 
 city. The moonlight touches the red-tiled 
 roofs and the crests of the low hills. But 
 
 dominating all is the figure of Genevieve 
 
London County Council © 39 
 
 in her white nun’s robe, praying for the 
 slumbering town. A dream picture, with 
 the misty aloofness of a dream; but also a 
 thing which makes it pleasanter for the 
 Parisian to pay his rates—and adding poetry 
 to an institution which might otherwise be 
 regarded as entirely prosaic. 
 
 Is there no English painter who could be 
 entrusted with the task of picturing the 
 story of London in similar fashion upon the 
 walls of the new County Council building 
 on the south side of Westminster Bridge? 
 Surely there must be, and the search would 
 be worth making. The assistants of such 
 a man would provide decorative painters 
 for the next generation, in as much as they 
 would have experience of the common 
 training and continuity of effort in which our 
 artists are so lacking, as compared with the 
 guild craftsmen of the Middle Ages and the 
 
 Renaissance or even with the Parisian 
 
40 External Influences 
 
 painters of to-day. Students of the 
 principal art schools of London, the Royal 
 Academy, the Slade, the Royal College of 
 Art at Kensington, and the Westminster 
 School of Art, were actually approached 
 and certain mural decorations were prepared 
 with the approval of Mr. Charles Sims, 
 Professor Rothenstein, Mr. Walter Bayes 
 and Professor Tonks. Eight students who 
 were paid no more than £20 apiece submitted 
 panels to the London County Council, but 
 their work was rejected, to their great 
 discouragement. The experience of Watts, 
 however, suggests the appointment of a 
 master-decorator, versed in the three arts, 
 and endowed with the needful vision of 
 civic achievement and ideals: It would 
 be useless to give such a commission to an 
 elderly man, in whom the capacity for 
 experiment is dead; such tasks are for the 
 
 mature craftsman, with his spiritual message 
 
Lincoln’s Inn Hall AI 
 
 strong upon him. Looking back one can 
 only regret that Watts did not have the 
 opportunities vouchsafed to Puvis de 
 Chavannes. With his ideals and his per- 
 suasive personality, he might in the course 
 of his long life have established an English 
 school of mural decorators. As it was Watts 
 had practically no pupils. The tradition 
 which he painfully won from the Parthenon 
 marbles and the paintings of Titian, Tinto- 
 retto and Veronese lives only in his gallery 
 canvases. 
 
 Yet all public commissions were not 
 denied to the Englishman. The Carac- 
 tacus, designed for the Houses of Parlia- 
 ment, has been mentioned. In 1856 Watts 
 spent a holiday at Halicarnassus, assisting 
 Sir Charles Newton in the excavations of the 
 Mausoleum. On his return he completed 
 the great fresco in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, forty 
 
 feet by forty-five feet, a work which had 
 E 
 
42 External Influences 
 
 been commenced in June 1852. The subject 
 was Justice—A Hemicycle of Law-givers; 
 the scheme owed much to the influence of 
 Raphael’s wall-paintings in the Stanze at 
 the Vatican, in particular to the School of 
 Athens. 
 
 The painter placed Moses in the central 
 place, with uplifted head in token that the 
 great artist, who took a poor shepherd stock 
 and created therefrom a people, was a 
 practical mystic, who received his orders 
 direct from Heaven. The Justice is one 
 of the largest works in fresco in England 
 and the most important decorative work by 
 the painter which remains. It has been 
 restored in recent years and is in fair 
 preservation. 
 
 Perhaps the picture which best suggests » 
 the potentialities of Watts in early man- 
 hood, when the desire to paint big decorative 
 
 canvases was strong upon him, is the Séory 
 
“ Story from Boccaccio ”’ 43 
 
 from Boccaccio, which has already been 
 mentioned as owing its origin to the painter’s 
 stay in Florence. It suggests why Ruskin 
 described Watts as the only real painter 
 of history and thought in England in the 
 ‘forties. The canvas is about eleven feet 
 by thirty and occupies a great part of the 
 long wall in the large sculpture room at 
 the Tate Gallery. The theme is taken 
 from the fifth day of Boccaccio’s entertain- 
 ment and illustrates Philomena’s tale of 
 the love of Anastasio. Says Boccaccio, 
 on a sudden the lover saw come out of a 
 thicket full of briars and thorns, and run 
 toward him, a most beautiful lady, naked, 
 with her flesh rent by the bushes, while in 
 close pursuit were two fierce mastiffs, biting 
 and tearing where they could. Behind, 
 upon a black steed, rode a gloomy knight, 
 with a dagger in his hand, who loaded the 
 
 unfortunate woman with the bitterest curses, 
 
44 External Influences 
 
 Philomena’s tale narrates how Anastasio 
 restaged this grim vision for the edification 
 of his cruel mistress, so that the fate of the 
 miserable woman of the dream so worked 
 upon his lady-love that she assented to a 
 marriage. Watts pictures Anastasio in the 
 centre of a group of young Florentines, his 
 lady-love being in the centre. On the right 
 is the reincarnation of the dreadful day 
 vision, with the rider on the black horse in 
 pursuit of his false mistress, who flies in her 
 nakedness from the hounds. The vigour 
 of the drawing and the variety of pose in 
 the frightened spectators of the vision, 
 together with the characterisation of the 
 chief actors in the tale, Anastasio and his 
 disdainful mistress, make the Story from 
 Boccaccio pictorial story-telling and decora- 
 tion of a high order. 
 
 It is characteristic of Watts that he offered 
 
 to paint the great fresco at Lincoln’s Inn 
 
Gifts to the Nation 45 
 
 without fee or reward, only stipulating 
 that the cost of colours and scaffolding 
 should be covered. The refusal to put a 
 price upon his work was no exceptional act 
 of generosity on Watts’s part. It was 
 characteristic of his attitude in regard to 
 all his ideal work. In 1887, when he was 
 asked by Sir William Agnew to sell Love 
 and Death to Manchester, he agreed, but, 
 
 6e 
 
 later, wrote that “‘as a sign of being in 
 fellowship with the movement you and 
 your colleagues are instituting in Manchester, 
 the picture you desire to possess shall be 
 placed in your hands as a gift.” Again, in 
 1898, when he commenced his bronze statue 
 of Tennyson for the Cathedral Close at 
 Lincoln, Watts refused to accept more than 
 the bare cost of casting, though he had to 
 buy a farm-house in which to model so 
 large a work. The Tennyson was com- 
 
 pleted in 1903, the central idea being the 
 
46 External Influences 
 
 poet’s love of nature. Tennyson is ponder- 
 ing over the root and stem of a little plant. 
 “ It is the lesson of the flower in the crannied 
 wall repeated,’’ said Watts. In echoing 
 the Laureate’s poem in bronze, Watts felt 
 that he was doing public service ; his reward 
 was to be a measure of public understand- 
 ing. When Watts painted his second version 
 of Hope now at the Tate Gallery, though 
 his purse had been drained by a long illness, 
 he refused £2,000 for the picture, preferring 
 it should be a gift to the nation, just as he 
 had refused payment for Love and Death 
 a year before. Equally characteristic was 
 the gift of the Galahad to Eton College. 
 Mr. Luxmoore had seen a small version 
 belonging to Sir Alexander Henderson which 
 was painted in 1862, and realized the worth 
 of its message for the youth of Britain. 
 He wrote to Watts on the subject and the 
 painter replied. Fifteen years later Mr. 
 

 
 Eton College & Tate Gallery 
 SIR GALAHAD 
 
 G. F. WATTS 
 

 
 ‘ é e : eee 
 hah ic A Be Fae i eo en a eee 
 
“ Galahad” 47 
 
 Luxmoore wrote again. This time Watts 
 sought out the original sketch and set to 
 work upon a new picture which was placed 
 in Eton Chapel on June 4th, 1897. Itshows 
 the young knight standing bareheaded by 
 the side of his white horse in the solitude 
 of the forest, and gazing with rapt eyes on 
 the Holy Grail. I have known a mother 
 give a copy of the Galahad to her boy 
 at his Confirmation; it is easy to imagine 
 the happy smile of Watts, had he heard that 
 his vision was bearing its message far beyond 
 the bounds of the school for which he made 
 it. 
 
 Watts’s Galahad and Bertram Mackennal’s 
 Eton War Memorial,—the nude youth with 
 arms outstretched, offering himself to his 
 country without reserve,—a bronze which 
 Lord Harcourt named “Take Me” 
 —show that the alliance of physical and 
 
 spiritual beauty still has power to move 
 
48 External Influences 
 
 those who are near enough to childhood to 
 escape the dazzle and rattle which so many 
 of us mistake for life. Akin to the gift of 
 the Galahad was Watts’s suggestion that 
 frescoes should be painted on the walls 
 of the classrooms in the great public schools 
 during the summer holidays and be there 
 with their messages of great truths and 
 noble deeds when the scholars returned to 
 work. As Watts visioned the purpose of 
 art such pictures would have had an educa- 
 tional value as real as any that come from 
 the more familiar books. 
 
 The gift of the Hope and the Galahad 
 belong to a time when Watts had tasted 
 the fruit of financial success, but his custom 
 was much the same earlier in his career. 
 In 1847, when the nation purchased his 
 Alfred, Watts put the very low price of 
 £200 upon it, hoping that his action would 
 
 enable the Royal Commission to extend to 
 
Euston Station 49 
 
 other artists the honour and advantage of 
 having their work purchased by the nation. 
 The Alfred now hangs in a Committee room 
 in the House of Lords. A few years later 
 Watts offered to decorate the great Hall at 
 Euston Station with a series of mural decora- 
 tions, asking no more than actual out of 
 pocket expenses for scaffolding, colours and 
 the like. If Watts had had the rugged 
 impetuosity of Tintoretto he would, doubtless, 
 have painted and placed the pictures in posi- 
 tion first and asked permission afterwards. 
 Euston Station might then have become 
 more than a railway station, as the Scuola of 
 San Rocco at Venice is more than a deserted 
 guild-house. The directors of the L. & N.W. 
 Railway did not realize what was being 
 offered. Perhaps they really feared the 
 fate which their architect predicted, that he 
 and the directors alike would be stoned by 
 
 agitated shareholders if Euston Station was 
 
50 External Influences 
 
 made a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, 
 though the cost represented no more than 
 paint and scaffolding. At any rate, the 
 directors’ reply was a definite “ No.” 
 These paintings, designed to minister to 
 what their maker conceived to be the mental 
 and spiritual needs of his countrymen, bring 
 us once more to the influences noted in the 
 opening pages of this study. Watts lived 
 and worked through the century which saw 
 the rise of modern democracy. Few artists 
 have less claim than Watts to be called “ the 
 painter of British democracy.’ Indeed, to 
 the present, there has been no Millet and no 
 Meunier in England. The people of the 
 Middle Ages built the communal cathedrals, 
 but the Gothic art of to-day, an art made by 
 the people and embodying the thought and 
 belief of the people, has yet to arise. When 
 such an art arises, with its humour, its 
 
 uncalculating exuberance of emotion and its 
 
Growth of Democracy 51 
 
 indifference to academic craft, it will be very 
 different from the stoic visions of Watts. 
 Nevertheless, the body of thought which 
 Watts expressed arose directly from ideas 
 astir in his age. Without sympathy with 
 the problems raised by industrialism and 
 the growth of great cities, a very different 
 personality would speak in that quiet hall 
 in the Tate Gallery. 
 
 After the first triumph of democracy at 
 the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, Britain 
 resigned itself to the direction of a small body 
 of capitalists, working upon a theory of 
 competitive contract. The theory was too 
 frigid and calculating to inspire a vital art. 
 It may have been responsible for Frith’s 
 Derby Day and The Railway Station, but 
 little more. The Reform Act marked the 
 transition from a monarchical and feudal 
 system to an industrial system in which the 
 
 suffrages of the many were to have a new 
 
52 External Influences 
 
 importance, but it did not bring about the 
 habits of mind which are most closely con- 
 nected with an appreciation of the beautiful 
 in nature and the significant in art. Instead, 
 man was conceived as a reasonable creature, 
 seeking his own happiness, and from this 
 social philosophers deduced the proposition 
 that government by the majority would 
 result in the happiness of the majority. A 
 political ideal arose which was summed up 
 in the phrase, ‘ the greatest happiness of the 
 greatest number.’ Men were thus led to the 
 belief that if a country became richer it must 
 become happier. They scoffed when Ruskin 
 asked what was the good of a train from 
 Islington to Camberwell which only took a 
 man from a dismal and illiberal life in Isling- 
 ton to an equally dismal and illiberal life in 
 Camberwell, just as they scoffed a generation 
 later when Tolstoi cried “what men aim at 
 
 in life is not to do what they think good, but 
 
Victorian Age 53 
 
 to call as many things as possible “ mine.” ’ 
 So far as the direct effect of Victorian politics 
 upon art and thought were concerned, the 
 end was the philistinism of the ’seventies and 
 the agnosticism of the ‘nineties. Victorian 
 art, whether in literature, poetry or painting, 
 arose rather as a protest against materialism, 
 utilitarianism and similar social doctrines. 
 Thus the revolt of the medizvalists came 
 with Rossetti. He and his followers found 
 satisfaction in old-world dreams, as Whistler 
 found an escape in esthetic moods. Later 
 came the Pierrotic nightmares of Beardsley 
 and, finally, the devastating mockeries of the 
 Post-Impressionists, the Cubists and other 
 ultra-moderns. 
 
 Watts was not associated with any of 
 these Victorian ‘‘isms.” Rather he was 
 the artist of the Aristocratic Compromise. 
 Realizing the consequences of the Reform 
 
 Bill, a section of the aristocracy of Britain 
 
54 External Influences 
 
 determined to make terms with the Middle 
 Class. Watts was one of the recruits which 
 aristocracy made from the lower middle 
 class : Carlyle was another ; his “‘ Latter Day 
 Pamphlets ’’ convinced many a doubter that 
 a beneficent despotism was a far from un- 
 satisfactory form of Government. The 
 Aristocratic Compromise proved so successful 
 that, within eight years of the passing of the 
 Reform Bill, Peel had rallied the newly- 
 enfranchised voters to the Tory Party, to the 
 support of established institutions. And, 
 in truth, the aristocrats did much to justify 
 their alliance with the masses. Though the 
 railways and steamships were reducing the 
 value of their estates, the great landlords 
 were generous in decreasing rents and accept- 
 ing agrarian reforms, and Lord Shaftesbury 
 and his Tory associates took the lead in the 
 factory reforms of 1843 and 1847, which 
 
 resulted in the labour of women and children 
 
Morality Paintings 55 
 
 being limited to ten hours a day. Later, 
 Maurice, Kingsley, and the Christian 
 Socialists took over some of the functions of 
 the Chartists. 
 
 Of the two movements, Watts was more 
 Closely associated with the reformers, led 
 by Lord Shaftesbury. Despite his birth, 
 Watts became a convinced aristocrat. He 
 said, ‘I confess I should like to have a fine 
 name and a great ancestry; it would be 
 delightful to me to feel as though a long 
 line of worthies were looking down upon 
 me and urging me to sustain their dignity.’ 
 Imbued with such ideas, he had little sym- 
 pathy with the destruction of class-dis- 
 tinctions threatened by democracy. Born 
 twenty years too late to share the sympathies 
 of Shelley and the Romanticists who revolted 
 against the reaction typified by the Holy 
 Alliance, Watts was moved by the sorrows 
 
 of the poor as Mrs. Browning and Hood 
 
56 External Influences 
 
 were moved. For a while after his return 
 from Italy the failure of his efforts to revive 
 fresco painting in England resulted in a 
 series of pictures which included Found 
 Drowned, The Irish Famine and the Seam- 
 stress, the latter echoing Hood’s ‘Song of 
 the Shirt,’ as Found Drowned echoed Hood’s 
 ‘One more Unfortunate, weary of Breath.’ 
 In 1850, Watts exhibited The Good Samaritan, 
 which he dedicated to Thomas Wright, a 
 Manchester philanthropist, who had done 
 much for discharged prisoners. Watts’s 
 association with Lord and Lady Holland 
 cemented his alliance with the aristocratic 
 reformers, alike against the Whig capitalists 
 and the reforming Chartists. 
 
 Yet, in spite of these political views, it is 
 impossible to label Watts, the artist, Tory 
 or Whig or Revolutionary. Rather he was 
 a good man, with the indignation of a good 
 
 man faced with wrongs. He once proposed 
 
“ The Minotaur” 57 
 
 to make a statue of Mammon and set it up 
 in Hyde Park, in the hope that Mammon’s 
 worshippers would be honest enough to 
 bow the knee. The plan was not carried 
 through. Instead the picture Mammon 
 was painted in 1885 and dedicated “ To 
 All his Worshippers.”’ 
 
 In the same year the crusade which W. T. 
 Stead called the “‘ Maiden Tribute of Modern 
 Babylon’’ goaded Watts into painting 
 The Minotaur, the _ personification of 
 brutalised vice which hangs in the Tate 
 Gallery. Half beast, half man, the Minotaur 
 watches from his fortress wall. A little 
 bird is crushed in his cruel claw. As in 
 Watts’s Jonah, the theme is an old-world 
 story, but the application is for our own 
 time. Every nine years the Cretan con- 
 querors of Athens compelled the city to 
 send a tribute of seven youths and seven 
 
 maidens. A  black-sailed ship took the 
 F 
 
58 External Influences 
 
 unfortunates to Crete. They were thrown 
 into the Minotaur’s labyrinth to wander 
 wildly until devoured by the monstrous 
 brute. The Greek tale gave him the first 
 idea, but Watts had put the original myth 
 aside before the first sketch was completed. 
 The burden which lay upon his soul, and 
 which he wished his countrymen also to bear, 
 was the horror of those girls, fifteen, sixteen 
 and seventeen years of age, sacrificed week 
 after week upon the altar of man’s vice. 
 After reading Mr. Stead’s article he went to 
 his studio and in three hours painted the 
 picture as we see it to-day. None will desire 
 to see the public galleries of Europe and 
 America filled with such denunciations. 
 But they may well feel that Watts would 
 have been less than the man this study 
 shews him to have been if he had not been 
 moved to a heartfelt protest through the 
 
 only means at his command—his art. 
 

 
 Tate Gallery 
 
 MAMMON 
 G. F. WATTS 
 

 
 « So 4 
 
 re ee ee ee em eR 
 
** Mammon ” 59 
 
 Mammon is the symbol of the environ- 
 ment which makes a Modern Babylon 
 possible. There were slave drivers in the 
 past; to-day, there is Mammon. Cruel 
 and insolent, moneybags in lap, Watts pic- 
 tured the gorgeous golden draperies hanging 
 awkwardly from the brown-skinned and 
 coarsed-limbed God of Modernity. The 
 naked boy and girl whom Mammon crushes 
 are types of the humanity which has accepted 
 the serfdom of the god. The thought 
 symbolised in the picture has been admir- 
 ably analysed in Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s 
 study of Watts. Chesterton imagines a 
 man, sick of the conventional argosies and 
 cornucopias of Commerce, stopping before 
 Watts’s picture in the Tate Gallery and being 
 arrested by it. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘this is 
 something which in spirit and essence I 
 have seen before. That bloated, uncon- 
 
 scious face, so heavy, so violent—that is 
 
60 External Influences 
 
 Commerce and this is why men fear him and 
 why men endure him.’ 
 
 Does such a picture as Mammon diminish 
 vice? Does it increase virtue? Whatever 
 may be the answer, the diminution of vice 
 is not the primary aim of an artist; the 
 painter whose only aim is moral edification 
 will fail in comparison with the artist who 
 is absorbed in the effort to reach the perfec- 
 tion granted to him by his material. Never- 
 theless, the intellectual power to grip and 
 develop current thought, and the emotional 
 power to express it with enthusiasm and 
 conviction, are signs of an outstanding 
 personality. By such means an artist or 
 thinker imprints his influence upon his age. 
 The desire to treat the problems of his day 
 is part of a high-minded and full-hearted 
 personality. Even if an artist cannot 
 directly increase virtue, he may lift the 
 
 individual beholder from one stratum of 
 
 
 
“ Jonah” 61 
 
 temptation to another, where right-doing 
 is less difficult. In this sense the endeavour 
 of a poet-painter need not be in vain, even 
 from the standpoint of morals. Writing 
 to the Bishop of Newcastle in 1900, Watts 
 defined his moral purpose by drawing the 
 analogy that, as music echoes the Divine 
 voice heard in Creation, art should clear 
 the sight to the manifestation of the Divine 
 power in the loveliness of nature. There 
 were times, however, when social wrong- 
 doing stirred Watts to a direct expression 
 of his beliefs. Then, like the prophet in 
 his own Jonah, he flung out his arms and 
 cried the Almighty’s warning: 
 
 “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be 
 overthrown | ” 
 
 The Jonah is in the Tate Gallery. In 
 the frieze at the back of the gaunt prophet, 
 Watts depicted the sins of a godless age— 
 
 gambling, money grubbing and drunkenness. 
 
62 External Influences 
 
 The form of the carved reliefs is such as 
 might have been seen in the palace of a 
 Babylonian despot 2,500 years ago. But 
 Watts speaks to this present time. His 
 message was to those who lived in 1895 and 
 to us, their children, who are recreating 
 Britain after the devastation, material and 
 spiritual, wrought by a World War. 
 
 For He Had Great Possessions is yet 
 another sermon in paint. When at work upon 
 the canvas, Watts said, ‘“‘ Now I am doing 
 a man’s back, little else than his back, 
 to explain the verse :—‘ And he was sad at 
 that saying and went away grieved’”’: 
 Watts went on, “‘ Fancy a man turning his 
 back on Christ rather than give away his 
 goods! They say his back looks sorrowful. 
 Maybe. At any rate, that is what I meant 
 to express.”’ 
 
 Progress is a social sermon in a less con- 
 
 crete form, and being a late work (1903-4) 
 
“ Progress ” 63 
 
 is more representative of Watts the Christian 
 Stoic than of Watts the social prophet. 
 The imagination of the painter had long 
 brooded over the Riders of the Revelation, 
 and in Progress he pictured the Rider 
 on the White Horse as a symbol of the 
 onward march of humanity. A crown had 
 been given to him who sat on the White 
 Horse, and he went forth conquering, and 
 to conquer. From the guidance of the 
 Rider there turns one to search for wisdom, 
 with no more aid than a guttering candle, 
 and another to grub in the muck for gold; 
 while a third mortal sleeps, a fourth sees, 
 and understanding the Vision, holds his 
 gaze upon the Light. 
 
 Life’s Illusion, now in the Tate Gallery, 
 was one of the earliest pictures in which 
 Watts expressed his philosophy of life and 
 conduct. It was painted at Dorchester 
 
 House in 1847, when the influence of Italy 
 
64 External Influences 
 
 was strong upon him. A knight on horse- 
 back pursues the rainbow-tinted bubble of 
 glory ; female forms, symbols of the hopes 
 and ambitions which torment humanity, 
 hover above ; while a child chases a butterfly, 
 recalling the elusiveness of fame and power. 
 With Time and Oblivion, completed at 
 the same time, Life's Illusions was one 
 of Watts’s favourites among his own works, 
 doubtless because it was one of his first 
 efforts to put his philosophy of life into form 
 and colour. After the memorable exhibition 
 of Watts’s work at the New Gallery in the 
 winter of 1896-7, the painter said that 
 these pictures were the two which seemed 
 to come near his mark. Of Time and 
 Oblivion, he added, “I think Phidias would 
 have said, ‘Go on, you may do something.’”’ 
 In 1902 he said, “ It is in many respects my 
 best picture.” 
 
 One can understand the return of an old 
 
Time and Oblivion” 65 
 
 man to a youthful love and yet realise that 
 the direct influence of Titian and the great 
 Italians had to be shed before the fully- 
 characteristic canvases of twenty and thirty 
 years later were possible. There is no ‘ best 
 picture’ by Watts, for the man and his 
 message are only revealed to those who will 
 link a dozen canvases into a single impression 
 and understand that the painter revealed 
 himself, not by what he did in one or ten 
 years, but by what he did during a life of 
 
 ninety years. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 STYLE AND SUBJECTS. 
 
 HOUGH portrait painting occupied a 
 great part of Watts’s early and middle 
 
 life, and he produced more than three hundred 
 portraits in oils, and numberless heads in 
 chalk, pastel and pencil, Watts said ‘“ Por- 
 traiture is notinmyline.”’ His search for the 
 abiding rather than the passing, and his 
 insistence upon the beautiful as opposed to the 
 ignoble in human character, however, are seen 
 as clearly in the pictures of Tennyson, of Man- 
 ning, of Carlyle and the rest as in the purely 
 imaginative works. The comparison afforded 
 by the portraits of Watts with the realistic 
 portraiture in an Academy or a Salon is also 
 significant. Watts was under no misappre- 
 
 hension as to the difficulties under which a 
 66 
 
Watts’s Portraits 67 
 
 modern portrait painter labours and which 
 persuade many portrait painters to content 
 themselves with mere likenesses. Remem- 
 bering the difficulties Watts said, ‘‘ Any fool 
 
 I 
 
 can copy,’ adding that a photographic lens 
 would accomplish these mere copyings of 
 Nature far more accurately than any artist 
 could hope to do. It is the soul that a man 
 puts upon the canvas for the delight and 
 improvement of his fellow-men that the lens 
 cannot accomplish. Nevertheless, in a letter 
 to Mr. Spielmann, the painter also said, “ It 
 is a mistake to consider that my portraiture 
 is in the ordinary sense ideal ; it is intended, 
 on the contrary, to be very real, and to make 
 it so my endeavour is to paint the mental 
 as well as the physical likeness. I always 
 try, as the chief essential, to sink myself 
 altogether in the portraits I paint.” 
 Realism and the search for the real are 
 
 very different things; Watts’s aim was to 
 
68 Style and Subjects 
 
 make each portrait the summary of a life, 
 not the record of a moment or an hour. 
 When painting Tennyson in 1889, Watts 
 expressly said that his aim was to shew the 
 grandeur of the poet’s head, not by accen- 
 tuating or emphasising—the method of the 
 mere likeness maker—but rather by keeping 
 in mind those lines which are the noblest. 
 “What I try for is the half unconscious 
 insistence upon the nobilities of the subject.” 
 While Watts was painting the earlier portrait 
 of Tennyson in 1858, the poet was writing 
 “Lancelot and Elaine’”’; he asked the 
 painter what was in his mind when he set 
 to work on a portrait. Later Watts’s reply 
 was translated into Tennysonian verse, and 
 is to be found in the memorable lines :— 
 
 As when a painter, poring on a face, 
 Divinely thro’ all hindrance finds the man 
 Behind it and so paints him that his face, 
 The shape and colour of a mind and life, 
 Lives for his children, ever at its best 
 And fullest. 
 
Comparison with Sargent 69 
 
 “Ever at its best.” How many of the 
 greater portrait painters of to-day claim 
 such an aim? Could Tennyson’s lines be 
 applied to their life’s work without foolish- 
 ness? Many, whose canvases fill big spaces 
 at the Academy or the Salons, are not even 
 loyal to their subjects. It has been said of 
 Sargent that “he hates his sitters with 
 splendid accuracy.” There have been times 
 in art when such hatred was required. 
 Perhaps Sargent is a necessity. But to-day 
 the world has more need of the sympathetic 
 penetration of character, for our age values 
 too lightly what is enduring in the spirit. 
 Just because his art is so full an embodiment 
 of the modern spirit, Sargent is over-faithful 
 in portraying what is fleeting. Posterity will 
 judge between the ideals of Sargent and of 
 Watts, and it will admit that Watts had not 
 the assured technique of some modern 
 
 portrait painters ; at times he had to wrestle 
 
70 Style and Subjects 
 
 with his pigment; but he found things to 
 love where Sargent found something less 
 than noble. 
 
 Watts was not an unprejudiced critic of a 
 Sargent portrait. But there is much in his 
 dictum that ‘“ Sargent’s figures exist with 
 startling vividness but they do not live. 
 They are as if electrified, galvanised into a 
 violent temporary existence.” The com- 
 parison between the two forms of art suggests 
 that there is a more lofty truth in the concep- 
 tion which comes from and returns to the 
 in-dwelling spirit, as was the manner of 
 Watts. There are moments when this 
 in-dwelling spirit transfigures a face and 
 these are the moments which the great 
 portrait painter must seize; for they 
 are the moments humanity should 
 treasure. 
 
 Watts always counted his portrait of 
 
 Carlyle, painted in 1867 and now in the 
 
“ Thomas Carlyle” 71 
 
 National Portrait Gallery, a failure. He 
 was conscious that the sitting was wearisome 
 to Carlyle. ‘“‘I said I would sit and so I 
 will do so,’ said Carlyle doggedly when 
 Watts apologised. Yet Meredith wrote of 
 this apparent failure, “‘ Carlyle has the look 
 of Lear encountering the storm on the 
 Cornish coast. You have given him that 
 look in your portrait.” Whether Meredith 
 was right, or whether the hammer-hammer 
 spirit of Carlyle escaped the gentler-souled 
 painter, still it was the man behind the mask 
 whom Watts wished to set down, for that 
 was the real man—the Carlyle who had 
 taught all earnest people that they must 
 take life seriously and do some work for the 
 world; that there is a yea and a nay, and 
 that all must make choice of the one or 
 the other. 
 
 Others of the series in the National 
 
 Portrait Gallery equally repay analysis 
 
72 Style and Subjects 
 
 from the stand-point of setting down 
 what was eternal in the man. Morris, 3 
 with the ‘‘mystery”’ look in his shrewd 
 grey eyes; alert at times, but ready 
 enough to dream when the catapult mood 
 was not uppermost. The rocky-counten- 
 anced Lyndhurst ; Walter Crane, a picture 
 beautiful in the quality of the very paint, as 
 suited the picture of a fellow in the craft ; the 
 portrait of Leighton, too, another painter ; and 
 perhaps the most remarkable of all, Manning 
 in his cardinal-red robes, who lives in these 
 few feet of painted canvas as surely as he 
 does in the word-study of Lytton Strachey. 
 Read what the historian has to tell and then 
 seek out Watts’s picture; the relation 
 between ultimate truth and what is enduring 
 in human character will become plainer. 
 The method of Watts did not necessarily 
 result in loss of power; seeking “ the best ” 
 
 in each sitter did not necessarily mean 
 
National Portrait Gallery Vie 
 
 flattery. Manning was a big enough figure 
 in mid-Victorian social history to be interest- 
 ing without flattery. ° 
 
 The noble series in the National Portrait 
 Gallery was inaugurated in 1883 when Watts 
 presented to the nation his Lyndhurst, 
 his Stratford de Redcliffe and the Lord Lyons. 
 In 1895, to celebrate the opening of the 
 new buildings in St. Martin’s Place, Watts 
 added seventeen other canvases, including 
 the Matthew Arnold, the Browning, the 
 Mill, the Manning, the Rossetti, the later 
 Tennyson, the Carlyle, the Owen Meredith and 
 the Siv Henry Taylor. Already there was 
 the nucleus of a portrait gallery of eminent 
 Victorians. Later when Morris died, Watts 
 gave the Gallery his picture of the poet of 
 British democracy, and, when Lord Leighton 
 passed away, the beautiful canvas, painted in 
 1881, of his friend the President of the Royal 
 
 Academy. The Walter Crane came to 
 G 
 
74 Style and Subjects 
 
 the National Portrait Gallery in 1915, 
 a noble harmony in golden browns and an 
 abiding evidence of how well Watts could 
 paint. 
 
 Under Watts’s will other portraits of 
 eminent contemporaries passed to the nation, 
 as each followed Watts to the grave, the 
 Swinburne and others. It is a pity that the 
 hanging arrangements in the National Por- 
 trait Gallery do not permit of all the Watts 
 portraits being placed in a single room. 
 Perhaps this may still be possible ; if so an 
 artistic joy will be added to the historical and 
 intellectual records provided. by the gener- 
 osity and far-sighted vision of the poet- 
 portrait painter. 
 
 In an equally noble, though less uniformly 
 successful, series of women portraits, Watts 
 avoided alike the mood of easy flattery and 
 psychological analysis. In place of individual 
 
 character, he emphasised what he saw of 
 
Women Portratts 75 
 
 grace in womanhood. When the history of 
 Victorian womanhood is written, it will be 
 — illustrated by many pictures by Watts from 
 the early Lady Holland and the gracious 
 Marchioness of Waterford (1848). to the 
 sumptuous full length, The Hon. Mrs. Percy 
 Wyndham (1877) and the Miss Rachel 
 Gurney of 1885, better known as _ the 
 Countess of Darnley, which hangs in Cobham 
 Hall, Kent. The brush of Watts assures 
 us that there are qualities in English 
 womanhood which escape a Laszlo, a Boldini, 
 and even a Sargent, qualities which we may 
 hope are more abiding than those which so 
 many portrait painters discover in the 
 women of our time. 
 
 Of Watts’s landscapes, not a large part of 
 his lifework, it will suffice to say that the 
 ideal quality found in so much of his art 
 is to be traced in them also. The Dove 
 that Returned (1869) and The Dove that 
 
76 Style and Subjects 
 
 Returned Not may be regarded as sea- 
 scapes or as Biblical illustration, as the 
 spectator chooses. The Mount Ararat and 
 the Carrara Mountains, both painted in 
 the ’eighties, also witness to the painter’s 
 obsession with the eternal in nature, rather 
 than the passing. To copy a natural scene 
 was not enough and a measure of the lofty 
 imaginings of Watts passed into his land- 
 scapes as they passed into the allegories and 
 portraits. He knew that nature and human- 
 ity alike are forms of the creative joy of God, 
 and in the light of this knowledge he painted 
 both. Towards the close of his life Watts’s 
 interest in landscape painting increased, but, 
 for the most part, these broadly-painted 
 sketches recall holidays in which the master 
 renewed his contact with the natural world, 
 before a fresh bout of work. The sketch 
 of Budrum in Asia Minor, with its big rainy 
 
 sky, recalls the Halicarnassus tour with Sir 
 
 
 
Landscapes q7 
 
 Charles Newton; the Savoy Alps and the 
 Highlands sketches recall the visit to 
 Switzerland in 1887, and the trip to Scotland 
 in 1899, when the broad belts of heather and 
 the colour of the hills and lochs of Inverness 
 impressed themselves so strongly upon the 
 painter’s imagination. Lastly, the night 
 scenes at Freshwater and Farringford are 
 instinct with memories of visits to the 
 Tennysons in the Isle of Wight. 
 
 Themes drawn directly from Greek legend 
 ~ make up a goodly part of Watts’s life-work. 
 In a well-known picture he represented Diana 
 in pale blue robes and still retaining the form 
 of the crescent moon, descending earthwards 
 to touch the lips of her mortal lover. The 
 subject of Orpheus and Eurydice made a 
 special appeal to Watts on account of his 
 life-long obsession with the mystery of 
 death. Perhaps the painting of this subject 
 
 which haunts the memory most surely is the 
 
od 
 
 78 Style and Subjects 
 
 half-length painted in 1869, shewing Eurydice 
 fainting in her husband’s arms as she hears 
 the dread summons, though this version of 
 the story has less of romance than the full- 
 length picture which shews the lute falling 
 from the singer’s hand and the lily dropping 
 from the dying woman ; for that very reason 
 it better suggests the mingled restraint and 
 emotion which betokened the Greek in the 
 presence of death. 
 
 The myth of Psyche and Eros made its 
 appeal to Watts as part of a long series of 
 picture-poems, dealing with the mystery of 
 Love. The Greek story expressed the union 
 of the human soul and the divine principle 
 of Love, felt but unseen. Yearning to see 
 the mysterious god, Psyche lights her lamp 
 and Eros is taken from her. Only through 
 suffering does she find him once more. In 
 Watts’s picture, Psyche stands in the grey 
 
 dawn looking with downcast eyes upon the 
 
SLLYM °H °S 
 SDIGAYNSA ANV SNAHdsO 
 
 UuorsatjoD Wwpypud A 
 
 
 

 
 * 
 
Greck Pictures 70 
 
 smouldering lamp and the crimson feathers 
 torn from the wings of the flying Eros. Too 
 late, she knows what she has lost. 
 
 A score of other pictures might be men- 
 tioned derived from Greek mythology. The 
 Childhood of Zeus, Ganymede, Daphne, 
 Hyperion, Prometheus, the two pictures of 
 the deserted Ariadne, The Bacchanal, Europa, 
 Mount Olympus and Dawn. The Wife of 
 Pygmalion, which Gladstone so admired, was 
 painted in 1868; of the picture, Swinburne 
 wrote: “So it seems a Greek painter must 
 have painted women, when Greece had 
 immortal pictures fit to match her imperish- 
 able statues. In this translation of a Greek 
 statue into an English picture, no less than 
 in the bust of Clytie, we see how, in the hands 
 of a great artist, painting and sculpture 
 may become sister arts indeed, yet without 
 invasion or confusion; how, without any 
 
 forced alliance of form and colour, a picture 
 
80 Style and Subjects 
 
 may share the gracious grandeur of the subtle 
 bloom of beauty proper to a statue.”’ 
 
 The beautiful bronze of Clytie is now in the 
 Tate Gallery. Apart from its power and 
 grace, the work has an honourable place 
 in the history of the renaissance of English 
 sculpture. It was modelled some years 
 before Leighton’s Athlete and Python and 
 has a full measure of the naturalism which 
 English sculpture required if the art was 
 to be lifted from the groove of conven- 
 tionalism in which it had been moving for 
 half a century, in spite of the noble efforts 
 of Alfred Stevens. In the Clytie there are 
 the qualities of classic art, nobility of concep- 
 tion, largeness of treatment and an absence 
 of that realism which shews that the artist’s 
 imagination did not suffice to fuse his visions 
 into a new unity. The Clytie was studied 
 from three models. Watts’s favourite model, 
 
 Long Mary, : suggested the magnificence 
 
 Clytie” 81 
 
 of line and the flexibility of movement ; the 
 muscles were drawn from a male model; 
 while Margaret Burne-Jones, then a child of 
 three, was the inspiration for some of the 
 most telling masses and curves. For the 
 rest, Watts had the story of the nymph 
 beloved of the Sun God, who pined in grief 
 when deserted by her lover and was changed 
 at last into the sun-flower. The poet tells 
 that the flower ever turns its face to the sun 
 in its course. 
 
 The right use of the human model and the 
 wedding of the mortal being to the ever- 
 lasting thought, be it narrative or idea, are 
 things which can most surely be learnt from 
 the Greek example. Writing of the Par- 
 thenon statuary, Watts said :— 
 
 ** The Greeks taught me all my principles of form. 
 After very careful study I found that they, perceiv- 
 ing in the skeleton the identity, with modifications, 
 of the structure of the lower animals, took the 
 greatest pains to accentuate all that belonged 
 
82 Style and Subjects 
 
 exclusively to the human.... The Greek ac- 
 centuated the straightness of the forehead, the 
 projection of the brows, the straightness of the 
 line of the nose, because they were all entirely human 
 characteristics. The Greeks shortened the space 
 between the chest and the stomach and lengthened 
 it from the throat to below the breast in man and 
 woman.” 
 
 Even in technical matters Watts strove 
 to find the general rule and the philosophical 
 justification. True, the knowledge that 
 came to him through the great Greeks was 
 only second-hand. The decorators and 
 builders of the Parthenon were in daily 
 contact with sights and experiences which 
 Watts knew only too well were lacking in 
 modern life, to the great loss of painters and 
 sculptors. Nevertheless, the Greek example 
 was potent enough to stamp its impress upon 
 his imagination to life’s end. 
 
 The example of the Greek sculptor did 
 much for Watts. But it failed to suggest 
 
Greek Example 83 
 
 a complete solution of the nineteenth century 
 problem. Whereas the Athenian was mainly 
 occupied with ideas of an intellectual order, 
 Watts could not quietly put aside every 
 thought which defied clear definition. The 
 Greek sculptor had even been able to elimin- 
 ate the mystery from Death. To him, 
 Death was no more than a woman with 
 features veiled. Such a symbol does not 
 suffice for the European of our day. The 
 fear of death is too deeply ingrained in our 
 nature to be exorcised thus easily. We shall 
 return to the part which Death and the 
 representation of Death had in Watts’s art 
 and philosophy. For the present it is 
 sufficient to emphasise that it was the Greek 
 example, and particularly the sculptures of 
 the Parthenon, which assured Watts that 
 great art and a full life are indissolubly 
 connected. Greek art was not a _ thing 
 
 apart from Greek life. A sense of high 
 
} aaa Style and Subjects 
 
 national achievement and a radiant con- 
 sciousness of a happy harmony of human 
 powers were the true source of its beauty and 
 worth. The crowning satisfaction of the 
 Greek as artist was that the people were ever 
 preparing themes for their sculptors, their 
 dramatists and their poets, and the people 
 saw to it that those themes did not escape 
 the possibility of clear definition. The Greek 
 artist was forced to content himself with 
 subjects which he could express lucidly. 
 Hence the perfection of Greek sculpture, a 
 perfection which shewed Watts how much 
 he needed the guiding and guarding criticism 
 of large bodies of his countrymen. 
 
 Let there be no mistake. Ancient Greece 
 furnished an example to Watts but there was 
 no question of copying from some other age 
 than his own. What the Greek had, and 
 what Watts hungered for, was the under- 
 
 standing and appreciation of his own people ; 
 
“* House of Life” 85 
 
 Watts, on the contrary, always felt he was 
 working alone. His methods were so unlike 
 those of other men that for long years his 
 countrymen were puzzled. [If his life’s work 
 proved only a series of sonnets when it might 
 have been an epic, it was because the 
 Englishman was denied a vital contact with 
 his fellows. But Watts, like William Cory, 
 never prayed for dryads to haunt the woods 
 again :— 
 
 More welcome were the presence of hungering, 
 thirsting men, 
 
 Whose doubts we could unravel, whose hopes we 
 could fulfil, 
 
 Our wisdom tracing backward, the river to the 
 rill ;sx 
 
 Were such beloved forerunners one summer day 
 restored, 
 
 Then, then we might discover the Muse’s mystic 
 hoard. 
 Had the faith and experience of Watts 
 attained epic form, it would have found 
 expression in his House of Life. To the 
 
 last, Watts professed himself unable to 
 
86 Style and Subjects 
 
 formulate his beliefs upon the place of 
 man in the scheme of creation, but he recog- 
 nised that mankind has been divinely 
 dowered. He saw Humanity placed, as it 
 were, in some mysterious hall, vaulted by 
 the blue heavens; here, dwelling in the 
 presence of the Creator, man was left to a 
 life of endeavour, rejoicing in the beauty of 
 existence, and accepting his position with 
 seriousness, modesty, sympathy and above 
 all, sincerity. It was a dream of the painter 
 to build a symbolical House of Life. In its 
 halls and corridors, he designed to place 
 a series of pictures upon the mysteries of life 
 and death as bodied forth in the history of 
 human existence. From a memorandum 
 drawn up by the painter, we may gain an 
 impression of the House of Life, as Watts 
 imagined it. The ceiling of the central hall 
 was to be painted with the fathomless blue 
 of space, from which the Sun, the Earth and 
 
“ House of Life”’ 87 
 
 the Moon would shine forth and suggest the 
 prime fact of the Universe, the Immensity of 
 Time. So the picture Time and Oblivion 
 was to come into its place in the general 
 scheme. Attendant upon the Earth were the 
 twin, but antagonistic, forces of Attraction 
 and Repulsion, the negative and positive 
 poles of electricity. Dividing the ceiling 
 by a golden band, upon which were the Signs 
 of the Zodiac, Watts purposed to paint a 
 nearer view of the scene in space and time 
 against which the Divina Commedia is 
 unfolded. Gigantic figures stretched at full 
 length were to represent the mountain ranges, 
 which make up the bony structure of the 
 planet; silence and repose characterised 
 the Titans. The revolving centuries, per- 
 sonified by womanly figures of beauty, were 
 to glide beneath the crags upon which the 
 gigantic forms lay, suggesting the negligible 
 
 effects of Time upon the everlasting hills, as 
 
88 Style and Subjects 
 
 compared with the effects of Time upon 
 humanity. The ceiling completed, Watts 
 proposed to fill the House of Life with pictures 
 which would illustrate the story of man— 
 first the hunter, slowly raising himself above 
 the brute beasts; next the pastoralist and 
 the tamer and trainer of the domestic animals. 
 So Watts conceived the coming of a patri- 
 archal Golden Age, a time when men enjoyed 
 as much happiness as humanity is heir to, 
 equally removed from the torments of ambi- 
 tion and the degradations of a merely animal 
 existence. Here Watts proposed to introduce 
 themes drawn from the Book of Job. 
 
 But the Golden Age ended. Watts 
 imagined the coming of the tyrant, the rise 
 of slavery, and the congregation of men in 
 great cities, until the pageant of the historic 
 civilisations commenced. Egypt, Babylonia, 
 Palestine, Persia, India, Greece, Rome, the 
 
 dawn of Christianity, the coming of the 
 
Manchester Town Hall 89 
 
 Middle Ages, the rise of the Saracen power, 
 and the Crusades. Watts purposed to 
 illustrate them all, until the House of Life 
 was furnished with a pictured history of the 
 Spirit of Man. 
 
 The House of Life of Watts, like Rodin’s 
 Tower of Labour, never gained material form. 
 Similarly, the scheme for the decoration of 
 the Town Hall, Manchester, projected in 
 1879, failed to reach accomplishment. For 
 Manchester, Watts imagined a series of 
 symbolic pictures bodying forth the happi- 
 ness that might come if the higher human 
 aspirations could be realised and the degrada- 
 tion which comes from disobedience to the 
 divine law could be avoided. Time, Death 
 and Judgment and the Court of Death 
 would have had their place in this scheme. 
 Both the House of Life and the decoration 
 of the Manchester Town Hall proved beyond 
 
 Watts’s achievement and so must be ranked 
 H 
 
go Style and Subjects 
 
 among the lost opportunities which might 
 have welded his craft and thought into epic 
 form. Even the best among Watts’s con- 
 temporaries did not understand the ideal 
 enshrined in the House of Life. Kingsley, 
 Maurice and the Christian Socialists, who 
 might have been expected to sympathise 
 with it, sought expression for the aesthetic 
 and spiritual strivings of the mid-Victorian 
 age in other directions. Ruskin and the 
 pre-Raphaelites were equally far from under- 
 standing this part of Watts’s aim. Never- 
 theless half a dozen pictures which might have 
 made their mute appeal from the walls of 
 the House of Life remain, most of which 
 may be found in the Watts Room at the 
 Tate Gallery. 
 
 Chaos might have been the first picture 
 in the cycle of the Progress of Cosmos. 
 In it we see the passing of the world from the 
 first wild negation of all things to the beauty 
 
“ Chaos” QI 
 
 of ordered creation. On the one side is the 
 tumultuous upheaval and disturbance before 
 the Spirit brooded over the waters, a tumult 
 of disorder which is rendered the more 
 significant by the rocky forms of the Titans 
 who cleave the earthy masses of which they 
 are still a part. In his vision of Chaos, 
 or Cosmos, as he would have preferred 
 to call the picture, Watts must have had in 
 
 mind the familiar lines from ‘In Memoriam.’ 
 
 The hills are shadows and they flow 
 
 From form to form and nothing stands: 
 They melt like mists, the solid lands, 
 
 Like clouds they shape themselves and go. 
 
 In the middle of the design, where the vast, 
 immeasurable abyss, outrageous, wasteful, 
 wild, is stilled by the passing of the 
 Shaper of Things, the vaporous uncertainty 
 of the sky suggests the Creator’s thought 
 of creatures yet unborn. [Everything is 
 
 potentially in the cosmic vapour, because 
 
92 Style and Subjects 
 
 everything lay potentially in the mind and 
 creating hand of the Shaper of Things. Light 
 is there, but it is veiled in mist. Air and 
 water are still commingled. On the other 
 side of the picture are giant forms, symbols 
 of the newly created continents as they arose 
 about the vast mountain ranges, and below 
 the dancing figures of the Hours, symbolising 
 the passage of time. 
 
 The forms of the mountains in Chaos 
 were suggested to the painter by the stains 
 and cracks on the damp plaster of a wall. 
 Sung Ti, a Chinese painter of the Eleventh 
 Century, used a similar device for stirring 
 the imagination to the search for what lies 
 beyond natural things. To a pupil, he said, 
 “You should choose an old tumbledown 
 wall and throw over it a piece of white silk, 
 Morning and evening you should gaze at it, 
 until at length you see the ruin through the 
 
 silk ; its prominences, its levels, its zigzags 
 
“ Chaos” 93 
 
 and its cleavages, storing them in the mind 
 and fixing them in the eye. Gradually 
 these prominences, wrinkles and hollows 
 will assume the shapes of mountains, streams 
 and forests ; you can fancy travellers wander- 
 ing among them and birds flying through the 
 air.” As Watts looked upon the mouldering 
 plaster he saw in vision the whole composi- 
 tion of Chaos. Years after, he painted 
 the picture. Finally, when he had lived for 
 a while under the shadow of the Alps, Watts 
 was able to echo the cry of Turner. Not only 
 the Sun, but the everlasting hills were God. 
 He had not been wrong in seeing in the snow- 
 clad mountains most sure symbols of the 
 Creator’s work. ‘‘ It would,” he said, ‘‘ be 
 worth anything to live amongst such hills 
 and have them to look at at all times.” 
 Partaking of earth and sky, they combined 
 the strength and reality of mortal earth with 
 
 the blue-celestial of eternity. 
 
94 Style and Subjects 
 
 The picture of Chaos would have been 
 one of a series picturing the story of mankind 
 as it has come to us in biblical, mythical, 
 poetical and verifiable history. The three 
 pictures of the Eve series also had a place 
 in the unfulfilled ambition. With the crea- 
 tion of Eve, the world was finished, the 
 Spirits of the upper air were free to rise in 
 triumph to heaven. Watts embodied his 
 imaginings of this stupendous moment in 
 the canvas, She shall be called Woman. 
 Newly born, with the glow of Creation still 
 about her, Eve rises amid a profusion of 
 fruit and flowers. Purple and white cro- 
 cuses spring in her path ; lilies, the emblems 
 of purity, are at her side, yet, at her feet, is 
 the gleam of the serpent’s scales. Above, 
 the clouds mingle with her hair and woman 
 reaches beyond the rainbow of hope. Only 
 the face is hidden, in as much as woman is not 
 
 yet known in the fulness of her perfection ; 
 
“ She shall be called Woman ” 95 
 
 the upturned features are shadowed in the 
 midst of light. It is not the Eve of Genesis ; 
 it is not the Eve of Milton. Rather, it is the 
 Eve of all time—strong, fresh, vital, electric— 
 an embodiment of the ideal inheritance of 
 humanity from the great Earth Mother. 
 In “‘ The Annals of an Artist’s Life,’’ Mrs. 
 Watts tells that her husband saw Eve as the 
 central figure of the Universe, that which 
 Plato had seen as a column of light extending 
 through the heaven and the earth, in colour 
 resembling the rainbow, only brighter and 
 purer. Writing to Mr. Spielmann regarding 
 She shall be called Woman, Watts said 
 that the picture would be wholly out of 
 place on the Academy walls. “I should 
 like to have it criticised in the Elgin Room 
 of the British Museum, while the two first 
 books of ‘ Paradise Lost’ were read, or 
 Beethoven’s ‘ Moonlight Sonata’ was being 
 
 played.” 
 
96 Style and Subjects 
 
 Watts was not a scientific painter, but he 
 was not unmindful of the effects of different 
 lines, masses, and colours upon the feelings. 
 Hoffding, in his ‘‘ Outlines of Psychology,” 
 touches upon the matter, and shews that 
 purple, red, orange, and yellow have a 
 stimulating effect and excite activity and 
 movement. Blues, on the contrary, are 
 depressing. Goethe once described the mood 
 induced by looking at a landscape through 
 yellow glasses on a dark winter’s day. He 
 tells how the eye rejoices, the heart expands, 
 the mind is cheered, an immediate warmth 
 seems to breathe in on us. Blue, on the 
 contrary, gives a feeling of chilliness, by 
 recalling shadows; green, which comes 
 between mournful blue and cheering yellow, 
 produces the impression of repose, without 
 the cold of blue and the strong stimulus of 
 red. Of a brilliantly illuminated landscape, 
 looked at through purple glass, Goethe said : 
 
The Eve Trilogy 97 
 
 “This must be the tone of colour which will 
 encompass heaven and earth on the Day of 
 Judgment.’’ In composing the trilogy of 
 “ Eve,” Watts subordinated everything in 
 the design and colour scheme to an expression 
 of the three stages through which human life 
 must pass. In the first, the newly created 
 soul is conscious rather of heaven than of 
 earth ; the hands fail to grasp the treasures 
 of earth; the foot alone is firmly planted. 
 In the second stage—in Eve Tempted— 
 the dominion of the senses is over the soul } 
 the figure is bent, because the Spirit is 
 enslaved. At the feet of Eve lies a panther ; 
 the serpent glides among the branches ; 
 the woman’s head is thrown back in an 
 ecstasy of abandonment to the flowers and 
 fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. In the 
 third picture—Eve Repentant—the earthly 
 paradise has been wrecked. In place of 
 
 the strong columnar line of Woman and 
 
98 Style and Subjects 
 
 the bent line of utter weakness in Eve 
 Tempted, Watts uses the leaning line which 
 suggests a return to the upright line of 
 strength and yet calls for support. An agony 
 of remorse and shame is to be found in the 
 colossal form blindly groping for heavenly 
 aid. The Eve Repentant contains yet another 
 of Watts’s wonderful back views. Note, 
 too, the splendid sweep of the great limb 
 upward from the firmly planted foot, a 
 Mother of Men this. 
 
 As the elemental lines of each picture were 
 changed to express the varying emotion, so 
 was the colour. In place of the glowing hues 
 of She shall be called Woman and the vibrant 
 tones of Eve Tempted, the colours of Eve 
 Repentant are saddened. In the first picture, 
 the sun of creation is smiling upon a new 
 world of infinite possibility and beauty; 
 in the second, humanity experiences the 
 
 stir of its own vitality, no less attractive 
 
Cain” 99 
 
 and no less beautiful, but instinct with the 
 possibility of evil and sorrow ; in the third, 
 where there is a return to relative peace, 
 where men and women can accept the world 
 as a gift to be enjoyed rather than as a 
 possession to be squandered, the colours are 
 the low-toned greens and browns of a twilight 
 shadowland. 
 
 The Diploma picture painted between 1870 
 and 1872, My punishment is greater than 
 I can bear was also intended for the House 
 of Life. To Watts, the story of Cain and 
 Abel was a drama in little of the eternal 
 world tragedy of selfish man. Cain was 
 the symbol of reckless selfish humanity, ever 
 killing his brother. The picture hangs in 
 the Diploma Gallery at Burlington House, 
 and in it Watts shews the denouncing voices 
 of conscience reproaching Cain with the sins 
 which culminated in his brother’s death. 
 
 The murderer is even denied the redemption 
 
100 Style and Subjects 
 
 of human punishment. ‘“ No man may slay 
 
 him.’’ Brute creation itself has no part with 
 Cain and “ no birds sing.”’ Yet, all the time, 
 Watts imagined an angel voice striving to 
 make itself heard above the evil passions 
 which haunted the murderer, and, in the 
 Death of Cain, painted in 1886, and also in 
 the possession of the Royal Academy, Watts 
 pictured the murderer as an aged pilgrim. 
 Broken by his long journey, Cain has returned 
 to die upon Abel’s altar. As he sinks 
 repentant upon it, the black cloud of his 
 curse is removed and the light of heaven 
 once more shines upon him. The sacrifice 
 of the contrite heart has been accepted. 
 These biblical illustrations and reflections 
 may be supplemented by the happy invention 
 known as Building the Ark, shewing Noah 
 as a patriarchal figure bearing two great 
 planks for the boat, which his sons are 
 
 fashioning in the foreground of the design. 
 

 
 Compton Gallery 
 
 BUILDING THE ARK 
 
 G. F WATTS 
 
oa 
 
 
 
Pictorial Invention IOL 
 
 Here the painter does not rely upon symbols, 
 but upon pictorial invention. The huge 
 planks and the mighty limbs of the patriarch 
 form a great cross which dominates the 
 canvas, lines and masses which are in happy 
 contrast to the swirl of the rising waters and 
 the curves of the feminine figures in the 
 background. All of the pictures of Watts 
 do not shew this pictorial invention ; 
 at times he relied unduly upon symbolism, © 
 which might well have been left in the 
 written words of his title. But when Watts 
 chose to rely upon pictorial invention, again 
 and again he proved himself a master, as in 
 the Eve Repentant, the Love and Death 
 and the Hope, which may be a charming 
 expression of an illusive emotion, but is 
 also a concrete representation of some- 
 thing seen in the painter’s imagination, 
 which has taken form in a combination of 
 
 certain curves and colours. It is important to 
 
102 Style and Subjects 
 
 emphasise this, as the form of this study, 
 centring as it does around the ideas of Watts, 
 might suggest that Watts the thinker is what 
 matters. Watts the painter can only be 
 understood when we recall what the painter 
 thought and how he felt. But Watts, just 
 because he was a painter, was primarily a 
 mind sensitive to form and colour and should 
 be judged by his success in selecting the 
 forms and colours which best represent the 
 world of nature and humanity as he found it. 
 Watts was a master-artist by virtue of what 
 
 he did, not by reason of what he thought. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE QUALITY OF THE ARTIST. 
 
 T remains to pass in rapid review the 
 positive factors which made Watts the 
 well-loved artist he is, rather than the 
 negative circumstances which balked his 
 life of its unity. From early manhood, 
 Watts used his craft to keep alive what was 
 noble in human aspiration and he helped his 
 fellow countrymen to see Nature with surer 
 and more intelligent insight. In doing this 
 he was giving out what was within himself. 
 Mrs. Watts, writing of a time before her 
 marriage, tells how intercourse with the 
 painter opened her eyes to the more beautiful 
 aspects of humanity. Walking to the studio 
 during a winter when Watts was at Brighton, 
 
 she found the very faces in the street less 
 103 
 
104 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 noble than a year before. Seeing only 
 ugliness or worse, she divined that her 
 interpretation had been different and that the 
 revelation of the soul behind the face was 
 failing her. It was Watts’s gift, alike as artist 
 and as man, to reveal the nobler overtones 
 in human life. Still later, Mrs. Watts tells 
 us, a clever woman who knew many of the 
 leading men and women of the world said, 
 “if I do not see Mr. Watts for some time I am 
 the worse for it.”” In the light of this testi- 
 mony let us look at yet another series of 
 paintings, the only things which now reveal 
 Watts the man. There are a number which 
 treat aspects of human experience, from the 
 moment when Youth is first tempted into the 
 rose-wreathed paths of love and pleasure. 
 Mischief was painted in 1878 and pictures 
 the youth bending beneath the sprite’s 
 yoke, heavy, though it is but a wreath of 
 flowers. Half ready, half unwilling, the 
 
“ Mischief” 105 
 
 youth is led by Mischief. In the back- 
 ground are the strong towers upon the heights 
 which shielded the man, until Mischief 
 lured him away with her wiles, her golden 
 locks, and the glitter of her iridescent wings. 
 Already the roses are turning to briars about 
 the limbs of the youth, as he nears the doom, 
 suggested by the slough at his feet. 
 Earlier, in 1865, Watts painted a similar 
 subject suggested by Bojardo’s ‘“ Orlando 
 Innamorato.’’ He called it Fata Morgana, 
 and it is now in the Municipal Gallery at 
 Leicester. The knight is in hot pursuit of 
 Fortune, whom he vainly seeks to catch 
 by the forelock of her hair, by which alone 
 she can be taken. 
 
 The first of these pictures of youth and 
 ‘atalinsd: the Szv Galahad, has already 
 been mentioned. This was designed in 1862. 
 Four years later Watts painted Aspiration. 
 
 In the dawn of the morning of life’s battle, he 
 I 
 
106 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 who wishes to be a standard-bearer looks 
 out across the plain. He sees into the great 
 possibilities of human life and the ardent 
 spirit of youth is sobered by the burden of its 
 responsibilities. The picture would say, 
 
 with George Herbert :— 
 
 Fool not; for all may have 
 If they dare try, a glorious life or grave. 
 
 The painter’s tolerance as a moral teacher 
 is shewn in the pictures in which he appealed. 
 directly to Christianity. Thus: Faith, 
 clad in the colours of charity, becoming con- 
 scious of the beauty in the flowers and the joy 
 in the songs of birds, washes her blood- 
 stained feet in the waters of Truth. She lays 
 aside the sword with which she had hitherto 
 sought to convert the world. The painter 
 desired to embody an idea which would be 
 accepted by all godly people and not only by 
 
 those of his own creed. The same vision of 
 
“ Spirit of Christianity ”’ 107 
 
 the eternal truth which made Faith look up 
 and see the myriad-coloured span of mercy 
 in the heavens, is found in the Spirit of 
 Christianity. Watts exhibited the picture 
 in 1875 and dedicated it ‘To All the 
 Churches’ as a protest against their un- 
 Christian divisions, and in hope that the 
 day might yet come when there would be one 
 fold and one shepherd. The Spirit of Chris- 
 tianity is throned high above the cities and 
 plains of the world, and beneath her robe are 
 gathered every human type and creed. 
 Ruskin may be right in regretting that 
 Watts substituted the sublimity of mystery 
 for the near presence of the saints and 
 angels in mediaeval Christian art. Yet, as 
 Ruskin himself admitted, Watts’s vision 
 represents an essential difference in religious 
 belief, which characterises the faith of our 
 time. God is not vividly present to the 
 thought of to-day. Watts would have been 
 
108 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 false to the truth as he saw it, had he 
 presented a substantial, bright and near 
 presence as the symbol of Twentieth Century 
 Christianity. 
 
 Watts wasa mystic. Those who knew him 
 
 ¢ 
 
 best felt in the poet-painter “‘an unusual 
 presence.’ At times there appeared a 
 transcendental self, visible in spite of the 
 cumbering outer form. Perhaps it was this 
 transcendental self, the Soul’s prism, whom 
 Watts pictured in The Dweller in the 
 Innermost. Watts imaged her winged, 
 sitting silent and = pensive within the 
 glow of truth; a star on her forehead ; 
 upon her lap, the divine arrows that 
 pierce through all shams; and the trumpet 
 of the truth which is always in the 
 conscience of men, though it may need 
 the steadfast strength of a Son of God to 
 sound it. 
 
 Watts was a mystic. He once awoke 
 
Watts the Mystic 109 
 
 from a dream to tell of a great anthem he had 
 heard which would have been one of the 
 great things of the world if he could have 
 written it down. “ Hallelujah, God is 
 Great,’’ was the theme. 
 
 He was a mystic, but a practical mystic; 
 with him dreaming did not take the place of 
 doing ; the deed, not the idea or the word, 
 was allimportant. The part Watts assigned 
 to action may be found in the statue which 
 occupied so much of his later years, the 
 equestrian bronze, Physical Energy. The 
 statue was unfinished at the artist’s death, 
 unfinished as Michelangelo’s Day was 
 unfinished. Physical Energy is the em- 
 bodiment of that restless impulse to seek the 
 unachieved in the world of material things, 
 the impulse which drives a modern financier 
 to seek to control more and yet more wealth, 
 long after he has secured all the satisfaction 
 
 which money can buy; the impulse which 
 
IIo The Quality of the Artist 
 
 sent Napoleon to Moscow, Alexander to the 
 Ganges, and Tamburlaine “ to ride in triumph 
 through Persepolis,’ and which Marlowe 
 
 summed up for each one of us in :— 
 
 Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend 
 The wondrous architecture of the world, 
 
 And measure every wandering planet’s course, 
 Still climbing after knowledge infinite, 
 
 And always moving as the restless spheres, 
 Will us to wear ourselves and never rest, 
 Until we reach the ripest fruit of all. 
 
 In Physical Energy Watts sought to 
 create a figure which should suggest man as 
 a part of the whole creation, with his hand 
 uplifted to the infinite, and his limbs fashioned 
 like the knotted roots of some great tree. 
 “TI do not wish my man to be like any model 
 you could find anywhere.” In its present 
 position in Kensington Gardens it is difficult 
 to gain a full idea of the poetry of Physical 
 Energy. The low plinth and the dwarfing 
 
“ Physical Energy ”’ EFL 
 
 effect of the distant line of trees rob the 
 statue of some of its power and from the 
 front and the back the design is unfortunate, 
 but there are aspects which reveal all the 
 poet-artist intended. A replica of Physical 
 Energy has been placed over the grave of 
 Cecil Rhodes in Rhodesia. Those who best 
 understand its message will carry the statue 
 in imagination from the quiet glade in 
 Kensington Gardens to the lonely waste of 
 the Matoppo Hills, where the shaded gaze 
 of the rider and the strain of the arrested 
 horse tell of a continent still unconquered 
 by man. As a memorial to Cecil Rhodes, 
 Physical Energy gains its full significance. 
 It becomes a call to achievements yet 
 undreamed of. The placing of Watts’s bronze 
 above that grave in the Rhodesian hills is 
 proof that the youth of Britain still listens 
 to the call which drew Drake to the Horn, 
 Cook to Botany Bay and Scott to the Pole, 
 
112 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 Surely it is a worthy deed to have embodied 
 an ideal so truly British in ever-during 
 bronze. 
 
 Another noteworthy statue by Watts was 
 the big equestrian statue, commenced in 1870, 
 of Hugh Lupus, the mythical ancestor of the 
 Dukes of Westminster, which was erected 
 at Eaton Hall in September 1884. The 
 original cast was given to the Crystal Palace 
 by the Duke of Westminster. The recum- 
 bent statue to Bishop Lonsdale in Lichfield 
 Cathedral, dating from 1869, the memorial 
 to Lord Lothian for Jedburgh Abbey, and 
 the statue of Tennyson which occupied the 
 last years of Watts’s life, are other works 
 showing that Watts the sculptor was a 
 figure in British art of only less interest than 
 Watts the painter. 
 
 Realistic portraiture has a manifest con- 
 tact with life and such pictures constitute 
 
 a large portion of the best work in a modern 
 
The Love Pictures 113 
 
 gallery, if only because a high standard can 
 be reached by painters whose insight and 
 craft would fail them if they essayed more 
 imaginative flights. The same may be said 
 of landscape painting, in its naturalistic 
 aspect. The standard of landscape painting 
 is on a high plane, especially in Britain. 
 Nevertheless, it will not be by landscape 
 painting or portraiture that the general 
 public will be won to a sense of the full 
 Significance of the arts. The interests of 
 humanity are primarily social and it is men 
 and women and the thoughts and feelings of 
 men and women, that men and women desire 
 interpreted. This essay on the life and times 
 of Watts, therefore, may fitly conclude 
 with a-consideration of the poet-painter’s 
 treatment of certain general themes which 
 touch us all,—Life and Love and Death. 
 The conjunction of words alone suggest a 
 
 Watts picture and for years he was haunted 
 
114 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 by the desire to make them realities for his 
 countrymen. 
 
 The series may be introduced by one of the 
 Cupid pictures, let us say Good Luck to 
 your Fishing. Then, perhaps, the fancy, 
 The Habit does not make the Monk, which 
 was painted about 1888 and represents 
 Cupid disguised under the cowl ofa monk. A 
 pretty girl visiting the studio asked the 
 painter ‘‘ At whose door is he knocking ? ” 
 Watts retorted, ‘“‘Oh, at yours, perhaps.” 
 When Poverty comes in at the Door, Love fies 
 out of the Window was painted in a different 
 mood and might be added to the category 
 of morality paintings. A young wife, 
 lying on her couch, is toying with a pet 
 bird, careless of the disorder of the house. 
 At the door appears hungry-eyed Poverty, 
 in the form of a half-clad man; whilst Love, 
 taking fright at the sight of the dread figure, 
 
 escapes by the window. 
 
“‘ Paolo and Francesca” 115 
 
 More poignant in their treatment of love 
 were the paintings of Paolo and Francesca, 
 from Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” The 
 earliest version dates from 1849 but the better 
 known was exhibited at the Grosvenor 
 Gallery in 1879. In it Watts gave an added 
 pathos to a great love tragedy by conceiving 
 the hapless lovers as clasped in one another’s 
 arms and whirled along on the unceasing 
 winds of Hell and, yet, amid the torment, 
 still absorbed the one in the other. As an 
 illustration of Dante’s poem, many will 
 prefer the glowing triptych of Rossetti, 
 picturing the lovers amid the tongues of 
 flame in the second circle of the Inferno, or 
 the strange swirl of passion in Blake’s 
 engraving. With Love and Life, dating 
 from 1883, and the two companion pictures, 
 we come upon a series which spring in 
 full meaning and beauty from the vision 
 of Watts alone. All are familiar, but the 
 
116 | The Quality of the Arist 
 
 painter’s commentary helps to make their 
 meaning plain. In the first picture, Love 
 with protecting wings is leading Life 
 over the rocky steeps of existence. Life 
 is a weak trembling girl, and as she is 
 helped gently up the rugged pathway leading 
 to the celestial blue, violets spring where 
 Love has trod. Here is not the passion 
 aflame in the Francesca story, nor the 
 mingled pain and sweetness which made life 
 a new thing for the youthful Dante, and yet 
 Watts’s Love is not quite the Charity of 
 Christianity, whom Watts elsewhere pictured 
 as a Madonna-like matron, seated in richly 
 coloured raiment, with the children of her 
 care. In Love and Life, Watts conceived 
 a Love transcending and including all 
 other aspects of the Erotes and the Charites 
 and made it the emblem of a new religion of 
 communal and personal service. He tells 
 
 that for years he sought to understand and 
 
““ Love and Life” 117 
 
 illustrate a great moral conception of life, 
 its duties and its pains and he came to the 
 conclusion that, while Justice should be the 
 main-spring of human action, Love should 
 give the direction. The painter went on to 
 describe Love and Life as his best composi- 
 tion illustrating this line of thought—Life, 
 naked and bare, sustained through the steep 
 ways of human conditions, until she reached 
 the region of full thought and perfect 
 character. From forgetfulness of this re- 
 ligion of Love, Watts saw spring almost all 
 the injustice and misery of the world. He 
 concluded: ‘“‘ This is what my painted 
 parable would recall. I would suggest 
 frail and feeble human existence aided to 
 ascent from the lower to the higher plane by 
 Love, with his wide wings of sympathy, 
 charity, tenderness and human affection. 
 Love is not intended to be either personal 
 
 orcarnal.” And yet as Watts said elsewhere, 
 
118 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 the Love of his conception had her feet on 
 earth, for all that is spiritual in this life must 
 gain its impetus from earth. 
 
 The first version of Love and Death was 
 exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1870. 
 Another, painted in 1877, is in the Manchester 
 Whitworth Institute. The Tate Gallery 
 version was painted in 1887. In 1869, Mrs. 
 Barrington tells that Watts was painting 
 the portrait of a young man of great promise 
 who was dying. The portrait was continued 
 at intervals. After each sitting the painter 
 felt that the disease had a stronger hold upon 
 the youth, that he was dropping closer to 
 earth. All that loving friends could do 
 was done, and from the memory of those 
 fruitless efforts came the basic idea of Love 
 and Death. 
 
 Love stands on the threshold of the House 
 of Life, barring the entry against the fatal 
 advance of Death. Already the bright 
 
“ Love and Death” 119g 
 
 wings of the god are crushed against the 
 lintel, the petals are falling from the roses 
 which Love has set about the porch. The 
 pale form of Death, clad in white from head 
 to foot, his face concealed, presses forward 
 with relentless tread; the arm is uplifted 
 above the head of Love as though he scarcely 
 knows the boy is there. Of the picture, the 
 painter wrote, “Love is not restraining 
 Death, for it cannot doso. I wish to suggest 
 the passionate, though unavailing, struggle 
 to avert the inevitable.”’ 
 
 When Watts returned to England after 
 his second honeymoon in 1886, the Tate 
 Gallery version of Love and Death was 
 put upon the easel. Mrs. Watts tells that 
 the painter saw that, owing to some subtle 
 changes in line or tone, the figure of Death 
 had neither the weight nor the slow movement 
 he desired. Day after day he thought and 
 toiled, each fold of the silver grey robe of 
 
120 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 Death being deliberately reconsidered, “a 
 hair’s breadth of line or a breath of colour 
 making the difference that a pause or an 
 accentuated word would make in speaking.” 
 By raising the outstretched arm, a less judicial 
 and severe impression was conveyed; so 
 the action was changed from “ I shall ’’ to the 
 more tender “‘ Iam compelled.” The shadow 
 on the left of the figure, by emphasising the 
 spinal line stretching from the bowed head 
 to the heel, greatly helps the design, as may 
 be seen in a very interesting series of photo- 
 graphs taken by Mr. Frederick Hollyer 
 while the picture was still in the making in 
 Watts’s studio. The colour scheme, too, is 
 in beautiful harmony with the theme, the 
 golden browns of autumn and the silvery 
 greys of winter, mingling with the green 
 shadows of Death’s white robe and the rose 
 and greens of the flowers and the wings of 
 
 Love. 
 
“ Love Triumphant” I2I 
 
 The third of the trilogy, Love Triumphant, 
 was finished in 1900, at the end of Watts’s 
 life. Time and Death, having travelled 
 together through the ages, are in the end 
 overthrown and Love rises alone on 
 immortal wing. Of Love Triumphant the 
 painter himself tells us that Time—con- 
 _ structor and destroyer—sinks and falls ; Death 
 sleeps who once put all to sleep ; Love alone 
 triumphant spreads his wings, rising to see 
 his native home, his abiding place. Thought 
 upon a kindred theme found expression in 
 Time, Death and Judgment, a picture which 
 was long in the making and exists in several 
 forms, including the well-known oil-painting 
 in the nave of St. Paul’s Cathedral and 
 the interesting mosaic which Watts pre- 
 sented to St. Jude’s, Whitechapel, where 
 it was placed on an outer wall of the church, 
 facing the street. Time, as a youth of un- 
 
 failing strength and vigour, moves hand in 
 K 
 
122 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 hand with Death, a womanly figure of power 
 and beauty in her robes of silver-grey and 
 green, while, in the clouds above, is the 
 crimson-clad figure of Judgment, armed 
 with the attributes of Eternal Law. When 
 Time, Death, and Judgment was shewn 
 at the New Gallery in the summer of 1896 
 this motto was inscribed above the frame. 
 ‘ Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it 
 with thy might; for there is no work, nor 
 device nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the 
 grave, whither thou goest ’—a variation upon 
 the moral theme in Aspiration. On an 
 adjoining pier of the great arch between 
 the dome and the nave of Saint Paul’s hangs 
 Peace and Goodwill. Peace is an exile 
 from her home but a queenly figure, who 
 despite her bruised and bleeding feet turns 
 wearily towards the dawn of a happier world, 
 which the son upon her knees may yet 
 
 inherit. Mercifully, Watts was spared the 
 
“ Hope”’ 123 
 
 tragedy of the World War, but, remembering 
 some of the pictures acquired by the Imperial 
 War Museum, his countrymen may well 
 regret that his gentle guidance and insight 
 were denied them during those years when 
 sacrifice and greed, achievement and death 
 mingled so strangely amid the tangled warp 
 
 of our island story. 
 
 La Rochefoucauld has said that there are 
 two things upon which mankind cannot look 
 fixedly—the sun and death. Among the 
 English painters it was Turner who revealed 
 the full glory of sunlight. At his life’s end, 
 it was a joy to Watts that he had done some- 
 thing to remove the terror from death. 
 Unlike the greater Greeks, unlike some 
 modern men of science, Watts could not 
 accept the time between the cradle and the 
 
 grave as self-sufficing. In his Hope he 
 
124 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 pictured humanity beset with obstinate 
 questionings and told of the misgivings of a 
 creature moving about in worlds not realised. 
 Hope had painfully won her way above the 
 world of effort, until a single star told of the 
 infinity of starland beyond and the singing 
 of a solitary chord gave promise of a time 
 when octaves upon octaves of golden strings 
 should be added to Hope’s poor lyre. The 
 apparent wastefulness of life made Watts 
 treasure the thought of death. When he 
 
 heard of Matthew Arnold’s death he said, 
 ““ And people who are like chips in porridge 
 go on living.” As Watts saw the final 
 puzzle, the very incompleteness of life may 
 be the surest argument for that other exis- 
 tence. Life here, with its murmurs of, the 
 mighty waters rolling evermore, cannot be all 
 that man is intended to know; he must 
 reach perfection and finality elsewhere. 
 
 In the pictures treating of Death we come 
 

 
 Compton Gallery 
 DEATH, THE MESSENGER (StTupDy) 
 
 r G. F. WATTS 
 

 
The Death Pictures 125 
 
 most near to the full philosophy of the 
 painter-poet. The Messenger, in the Man- 
 chester Whitworth Institute and the Tate 
 Gallery, pictures the Messenger of Death 
 bringing rest after a life of strenuous toil 
 and achievement. At the feet of the dying 
 man in his orange-red robes are the mallet 
 and palette of the arts, the book and the 
 violin. The outworn man hears the call, 
 and opening his eyes, he finds not the Death 
 he expected, but a kindly Consoler, bearing 
 in her arms a little child—the dying man’s 
 real selfi—whom the Messenger will nurse into 
 perfection in the fuller life beyond the grave. 
 
 Even in the passing of a little child—the 
 saddest form of death—Watts found a com- 
 pensation. It was in July 1886 that Watts 
 asked his second wife to marry him. He was 
 sixty-nine and there was a momentary doubt 
 as to what friends might think of the union 
 
 between the master and his pupil. It was 
 
126 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 agreed that, for a while, nothing should be 
 said of the engagement, and the bride went 
 to stay with her brother in Scotland. During 
 the visit a little son of the house fell from 
 his pony and after a month’s illness died. 
 Mrs. Watts wrote to the painter telling him 
 the story. He replied, “ I could hardly read 
 your letter for very pity. I feel with you 
 to have suffered a personal loss.”’ Being 
 himself ill in bed, he asked for a pencil and 
 drew a tiny sketch for the stricken mother. 
 In a covering letter to Mrs. Watts, he de- 
 scribed the sketch as the Angel of Death with 
 a child in her lap, on whose head she is 
 placing a circlet-—Death the Angel crowning 
 Innocence. The finished picture, a colour 
 symphony in the moss-greens of earth and the 
 blues of night, was among those which Watts 
 refused to sell. Choosing that the Silent Angel 
 of Pity should comfort the many rather than 
 
 the few, he gave it to the nation. 
 
“ Sic Transit” 127 
 
 This was life unfulfilled. In the Sic 
 Transit, Watts laid a chaplet upon the bier 
 of one who passed away rich in honour and 
 achievement. In the dim light of a death 
 chamber lies one wrapped in a great shroud ; 
 the laurel of victory and other tokens of 
 glorious human life are near by; the helmet 
 with its peacock’s plume, the lute, the 
 jewelled cup and the book. On the canvas 
 
 Watts wrote :— 
 
 What I spent, I had. 
 What I saved, I lost. 
 What I gave, I have. 
 
 It was the conception of Death, the friend, 
 rather than Death, the foe, which Watts 
 strove to impress upon the imagination of 
 his fellow-men and, as the truth in its broadest 
 aspect was the truth upon which Watts 
 loved to dwell, he pictured the power of 
 Death as impersonal. 
 
 Very few have reached the philosophic 
 
128 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 position of Epicurus who could say, ““Why 
 should death concern me, since when it is 
 I am not and when I am it is not.” But 
 there is a richer and a deeper belief which ~ 
 transcends the instinctive agony of the 
 moment of parting. It is _ beautifully 
 expressed in Bartholomé’s Monument to the 
 Dead in Pére Lachaise, in which he carved 
 the Angel of Immortality holding open the 
 door of the symbolic tomb as she looks with 
 kindly sympathy upon the sleeping forms 
 at her feet—a man, a woman and their one 
 year old child, united in life and not divided 
 
 in death. The inscription is from Isaiah :-— 
 
 “The people that walked in darkness have seen 
 a great light; they that dwell in the land of the 
 shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.” 
 
 Technical criticism of such a work is out 
 of place here, but this may be said. In no 
 
 respect is the treatment realistic, nor, on the 
 
Watts the Seer 129 
 
 contrary, is it classical, save in the post- 
 ponement of physical to spiritual anguish. 
 The Monument aux Morts is strikingly 
 modern in execution, the naturalism in the 
 modelling of the limbs being akin to the 
 methods by which the sculptors of to-day 
 are expressing their thought and feeling in 
 other branches of the art. But the real 
 beauty of the work lies in the absence of 
 every suggestion of individualism. It is 
 truly a “Monument Aux Morts’’—to the 
 Mighty Dead,—and tells of an artist who 
 might, or might not, have been stirred by 
 the sufferings of an individual but who, 
 at any rate, was inspired to a work of 
 lasting worth by the common defeat or 
 common victory in which we must all 
 share. 
 
 The difficulties which Watts faced and 
 the difficulties which the artists of to-day 
 
 must face are mental and spiritual as well as 
 
130 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 material. Humanity has been caught in 
 the undertow of a civilization which, with 
 all its material excellences, is essentially non- 
 spiritual. It is doubtful if the experience 
 of a man or woman to-day is greater than 
 it was a couple of centuries ago when folk 
 were really familiar with the fields, woods 
 and hills of their own district and really 
 knew those who lived in their own village, 
 and worshipped in their own parish church. 
 The modern trouble is that, at once, we see 
 too much and too little. In every direction 
 we find it difficult to secure those sure, 
 concrete visions of nature and humanity 
 which have always been the best food for the 
 imagination and the basis of the greatest art 
 efforts. Living at a time not far removed 
 from our own, Watts sought to establish a 
 harmony between his countrymen and the 
 All of Things, which is real knowledge. He 
 did this without abandoning the tested 
 
Vision of Deity 131 
 
 methods of his craft and without throwing 
 aside the old-time faith. Though he may not 
 claim full success, and though the problems 
 he faced were not entirely our problems, there 
 is comfort and inspiration in the conception 
 of history and life which he evolved and 
 which he expressed in an art based upon 
 beauty and honest labour. His example 
 assures us that painting can still catch 
 from fleeting time the calm of blest 
 eternity. Above all, his example gives 
 assurance that from the shattering of the 
 old beliefs, a more enlightened philosophy 
 may arise. 
 
 The All-pervading, painted about 1899 
 or 1900, the picture of the brooding angel 
 dominant over, and yet immanent in, the 
 universe, symbolised by the sphere in its 
 hands, was the seer’s final expression of his 
 vision of deity. Mindful of the electrons 
 
 which circle around the nucleus of the ninety- 
 
132 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 two elemental atoms, the God of Watts was 
 also mindful of Sirius, of Betelgeuse, and the 
 myriad marvels of the Milky Way. Like 
 many modern men and women, Watts could 
 not see Creation as the work of the kindly, 
 white-bearded patriarch of earlier imagina- 
 tion. The Godhead must be regarded as 
 immanent in the world and humanity, if 
 Chaos, the Eve trilogy and the pictures 
 of Love, Life and Death are to be understood. 
 To Watts, Creation was a breath issuing from 
 God which became matter. ‘“‘ If I were ever,” 
 he said, ‘‘ to make a symbol of Deity it would © 
 be as a great vesture into which everything 
 that exists is woven.” Watts illustrated his 
 idea of the conflict between force and 
 gravitation by the shuttle which has to go 
 backwards and forwards to create the web, an 
 idea which coincided happily with his vision 
 of all creation as the garment of God. 
 
 Passing from time to eternity, he could 
 
Vision of Deity 133 
 
 conceive of a state of happiness when human 
 beings become one without loss of individual 
 consciousness, just as a woven piece of linen 
 is one, though composed of an_ infinite 
 number of strands. 
 
 It is because the faith of Watts was one 
 which a deist of to-day can accept that we 
 may affirm his essential popularity, in the 
 sense that he offered his countrymen, what 
 the best of them are always seeking—a clue 
 to the riddle of existence. The artist who 
 deliberately refuses to satisfy this craving 
 may please for an hour; he may flourish for 
 a decade ; but consciously or unconsciously, 
 the truly great artist has always been 
 obsessed with interests beyond those of an 
 idle hour. Titian and Tintoretto; Michel- 
 angelo, Raphael and Da Vinci; Rubens, 
 Rembrandt, and Velasquez; Reynolds and 
 Turner ; Alfred Stevens and Alfred Gilbert. 
 
 Men of this kind have been the torch bearers 
 
134 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 of humanity. Falling, each has flung his 
 burning brand to the runner that followed, 
 and because they expressed more than their 
 individual moods, they are, or they will be, 
 of the number the mass of the people will seek 
 to understand. 
 
 Why boggle over the word “ popular ’— 
 of the people? Serving his public never 
 troubled the craftsman of old; the person 
 who is harmed is the professional gentleman 
 of to-day. When Verrocchio sold his wares 
 in Florence, he was willing to adapt himself 
 to the communal mind. So was Phidias. 
 Yet the professional painter or sculptor of 
 to-day too often merely plays upon the whims 
 of a section. It may be the section which 
 asks him to dinner . it may be the claque 
 which crowds the studio on Show Sunday. 
 But working with a faith in the value of his 
 message for the whole body of his country- 
 
 men, the artist will find that many whom he 
 
Art and Revelation 135 
 
 believed blind, can see. Speaking at Cam- 
 bridge some years ago Sir Arthur Quiller 
 Couch defined the relation between the artist 
 and the ordinary man of the people thus: 
 “As we dwell here between two mysteries of 
 the soul within and an ordered universe 
 without, so among us are granted to dwell 
 certain men of more delicate intellectual 
 fibre than their fellows ; men whose minds 
 have as it were filaments to intercept, 
 apprehend, conduct, translate home to us 
 stray messages between these two mysteries.’ 
 These men are the artist-seers and the purpose 
 of their creation is revelation. Craft is the 
 means by which they achieve their end, 
 and without adequate craftsmanship they 
 must fail. But those who have the needful 
 powers of hand and mind may rightly 
 desire that their revelation should be to the 
 many and not to the few. Though there is 
 
 no universal test of great art, there is none 
 
136 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 more generally applicable than the test which 
 Ferrier devised for philosophical truth— 
 
 ‘ For all and not for some.’ 
 
 This may be said in conclusion. Though 
 it would be difficult to rate the example of the 
 poet-painter too highly, it is easy to overstate 
 the case when determining the place of Watts 
 among the great artists of allages. At times 
 the hand of the painter distrusted its power 
 to express the visions of the mind and heart. 
 
 Not always did Watts’s designs reveal true 
 
 pictorial invention, as in the remorseless 
 
 movement of the robed figure of Death or the 
 passionate abandon of the sorrowing Eve. 
 In the man himself there was a certair 
 humourlessness. He had not the sweet 
 bloodedness, say of Burne-Jones, of whom it 
 has been said that he was a man you were 
 happy with. Watts aroused noble thoughts 
 
 and the desire for high endeavour in those 
 
Art and Revelation 137 
 
 with whom he came in contact, but not all the 
 careless joy that is to be found in common 
 things. We see his gentle spirit moving 
 through the green shades of Limbo with 
 Homer, with Heraclitus, and with Plato— 
 one of them, but a listener always. Watts 
 claimed kinship with the great poets ; he did 
 not claim equality. He had not the insati- 
 able curiosity which is a primary attribute 
 of the world-genius. The fact that he was 
 seldom at enmity with the world, entailed 
 the loss of a certain intensity which arises 
 from struggle and defeat, as, in even greater 
 artists, it arises from struggle and triumph. 
 For these reasons, the imagination of Watts 
 seldom reached the impassioned glow which 
 gives complete fusion between the material 
 and the spiritual. Nor had he the sublime 
 faith in his powers with which a great age 
 can endow an artist. The serenity of 
 
 Phidias, of Shakespeare, was not for Watts, 
 i 
 
138 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 perhaps because Watts sought consciously, | 
 while they were unconscious. 
 
 The value of the example of Watts is rather 
 to be found in his belief in the artist as an 
 instrument of God. Watts never forgot that 
 he was working for men and women, each with 
 animmortal soul. He judged he was painting 
 the commonplace when he failed to reveal 
 the one thing worthy of discovery. If the 
 endowment of our painter had to be gathered 
 into a phrase it would be that he had the 
 divine gift of enthusiasm, enthusiasm which 
 
 Emerson characterised as ‘the height of 
 man, the passing from the human to 
 
 the divine’’; enthusiasm which has been 
 even more beautifully defined as “‘ God 
 breaking into visibility through a human 
 life:”’ 
 
 Faith in a religious creed is not a necessary 
 condition to the well-being of a great poet 
 
 or painter, but faith in something is essential. 
 
Art and Revelation 139 
 
 Harnessed to our work-a-day labours we feel 
 the play of our muscles and the effort of the 
 mind, though the totality of things is beyond 
 our comprehension and only to be appre- 
 hended by faith. Religion is one expression 
 of the inner life which beats in harmony with 
 the Creator; art is another. For those who 
 would recreate the god-like mood in which 
 the Creator endowed humanity with a 
 measure of his own infinite powers, art and 
 religion are one. The painter is content with 
 the earthbound thing, in as much as his 
 concern is with what men can handle and 
 see, but he also seeks to reveal a God-given 
 life; to display God-given energies. Art 
 allows us to live with Phidias on the Acro- 
 polis, with Fra Angelico in the shady 
 cloisters of San Marco, or with Leonardo, in 
 the bare council chamber of the Signorial 
 Palace at Florence. Were it not for art 
 
 most of us would pass into the shadowland 
 
I40 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 without ever knowing the full endowments of 
 the human mind and heart. 
 
 Lacordaire once said ‘‘ God is not coming 
 into your life at the tail of an argument.” 
 Nor is art. Nevertheless the proposition 
 with which this study commenced shall be 
 justified. Art must again be recognised as 
 the expression of the All of Human Experi- 
 ence and this unity of the knowable will be 
 restored to the world when art is granted 
 once more its due place in social life. 
 Rightly understood history is the story of the 
 effort of the creative force to arrive at some- 
 thing which is only realised in man, and even 
 in man only imperfectly. When a sufficiency 
 of simple food and clothing was secured, 
 man made his first step towards a knowledge 
 of this creative effort. A grave has been 
 unearthed in the Dordogne Valley in which a 
 Mousterian hunter was laid to rest. Heavy 
 
 jawed, chinless, with snout-like nose and a 
 
 
 
Art and Revelation I4I 
 
 marked ridge extending across his forehead 
 from temple to temple, he had risen little 
 higher than the beasts with whom he 
 herded. Yet with the body were laid 
 fragments of red ochre, offerings of food and 
 well-fashioned flint tools for use in the spirit 
 world. Already science and religion went 
 hand in hand and together made art. Among 
 the artists of our time to whom the same 
 vision was vouchsafed, is the subject of this 
 study. The sonnet, in which Swinburne 
 summed up the best that his countrymen 
 could say of George Frederic Watts, was no 
 
 more than the artist’s due :— 
 
 High thought and hallowed love, by faith made one, 
 Begat and bare the sweet strong-hearted child, 
 Art, nursed by Nature ; earth and sea and sun 
 
 Saw Nature then more god-like as she smiled. 
 
 Life smiled on Death, and Death on Life; the Soul 
 Between them shone and soared above their strife 
 And left on Time’s unclosed and starry scroll 
 
 A sign that quickened death to deathless life. 
 
142 The Quality of the Artist 
 
 Peace rose like Hope, a patient queen, and bade 
 
 Hell’s first-born, Faith, abjure her creed and die ; 
 
 And love, by life and death made sad and glad, 
 
 Gave Conscience ease and watched Good Will pass 
 by. 
 
 All these make music now of one man’s name, 
 
 Whose life and age are one with love and fame, 
 
APPENDIX I 
 
 List oF PICTURES BY WATTS IN BRITISH GALLERIES 
 OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. 
 
 LONDON: Royat ACADEMY (DIPLOMA GALLERY). 
 
 “‘ My punishment is greater than I can bear.” 
 The Death of Cain (1886). 
 
 Lord Leighton (1890). 
 
 Portrait of the Artist (1864). 
 
 LONDON: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 683. Lord Lyndhurst. 
 684. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe. 
 685. Lord Lyons. 
 895. Earl Russell. 
 1000. Matthew Arnold. 
 toor1. Robert Carlyle. 
 1002. Thomas Carlyle. 
 1003. Sir Andrew Clark (1894). 
 1004. Sir Charles Hallé. 
 1005. Lord Lawrence. 
 too6. Sir A. Henry Layard. 
 1007. Earl of Lytton (Owen Meredith). 
 1008. Cardinal Manning (1882). 
 toog. John Stuart Mill. 
 toro. Sir Anthony Panizzi. 
 torr. D.G. Rossetti (1865). 
 1012. _ Earl of Shaftesbury (1882). 
 
 143 
 
144 
 
 1013. 
 IOI4. 
 IOI5. 
 Io16. 
 1049. 
 1078. 
 1126. 
 1127. 
 I251. 
 1263. 
 1324. 
 1349. 
 1350. 
 1406. 
 1542. 
 
 Appendix 
 
 Viscount Sherbrooke (1882). 
 Sir Henry Taylor. 
 
 Lord Tennyson. 
 
 Thomas Wright. 
 
 Lord Leighton (1881). 
 William Morris (1880). 
 
 W. E. Gladstone (1865). 
 
 Sir John Grant. 
 
 Dr. James Martineau (1874). 
 8th Duke of Argyil. 
 
 Dean Milman. 
 
 Lord Salisbury (1884). 
 
 W. E. Lecky (1878). 
 
 G. F. Watts (unfinished). 
 
 A. C. Swinburne. 
 
 George, Marquess of Ripon (1895). 
 Walter Crane (1891). 
 
 LoNDON: NATIONAL GALLERY, MILLBANK. 
 
 1561. 
 
 1585. 
 1630. 
 
 1631. 
 1632. 
 1633. 
 1634. 
 1635. 
 1636. 
 1637. 
 1638. 
 1639. 
 1640. 
 
 Portrait of the Artist (1864). 
 
 Psyche. f 
 
 Mammon (Dedicated to his Worshippers) 
 (1885). 
 
 The Dweller in the Innermost. 
 
 “For he had great possessions ’’ (1895). 
 
 Dray Horses (1864). 
 
 The Minotaur. 
 
 Death Crowning Innocence. 
 
 Jonah (1895). 
 
 The Spirit of Christianity (1875). 
 
 “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi ’’ (1892). 
 
 Faith. 
 
 Hope (1885). 
 
1641. 
 1642. 
 
 1643. 
 
 1644. 
 
 1645. 
 1646. 
 
 1647. 
 
 1687. 
 
 1692. 
 
 1693. 
 1894. 
 
 1913. 
 1920. 
 
 1983. 
 2682. 
 
 Appendix 145 
 
 Love and Life. 
 
 *“ She shall be called Woman ”’ (1892). 
 
 Eve Tempted. 
 
 Eve Repentant. 
 
 Love and Death. 
 
 The Messenger. 
 
 Chaos. 
 
 The All Pervading. 
 
 Love Triumphant (1900). 
 
 Time, Death and Judgment. 
 
 The Court of Death (Finished on his 86th 
 Birthday). 
 
 A Story from Boccaccio. 
 
 Life’s Illusions. 
 
 Echo (1843). 
 
 Portrait of a Gentleman. 
 
 On LOAN FROM THE COMPTON GALLERY. 
 
 Bacchante. 
 
 Farringford. 
 
 Freshwater. 
 
 Hon. A. Spring-Rice. 
 
 In Asia Minor—Budrum. 
 Jacob and Esau. 
 
 Lady Garvagh. 
 
 Lady Lilford. 
 
 Loch Ness. 
 
 Miss Mildmay. 
 Moorland, Inverness-shire. 
 Off Corsica. 
 
 Portrait Study of a Girl. 
 Sea Ghost, 
 
146 Appendix 
 
 The Countess Somers. 
 
 The Land of Weissnichtwo. 
 Undine. 
 
 Whence and Whither. 
 
 Lonpon : NATIONAL GALLERY, TRAFALGAR SQUARE, 
 
 1654. Right Hon. Russell Gurney. 
 On Loan: Orpheus and Eurydice. 
 
 LONDON: THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM 
 (SouTH KENSINGTON). 
 
 1. The Window Seat (1861). Ionides Collection. 
 2. Daphne’s Bath. Ionides Collection. 
 The Ionides Family (Ten Pictures). 
 39. Thomas Carlyle (1868). Forster Collection. 
 Portrait of A. Legros. 
 
 Lonpon: St. PAuL’s CATHEDRAL, 
 
 Time, Death and Judgment. 
 Peace and Goodwill. 
 
 BIRMINGHAM: MusEUM AND ART GALLERY. 
 
 843. A Roman Lady. 
 844. Little Red Riding Hood (1890). 
 
 Bury: City ArT GALLERY. 
 192. Portrait of Mr. Thomas Wrigley (1875). 
 
 EDINBURGH : NATIONAL GALLERY OF SCOTLAND, 
 932. Mischief (1878). 
 
GUILDFORD: 
 
 = 
 
 dis se salir UN a at de 
 
 Appendix 
 
 Study of a Donkey’s Head. 
 The Mid-day Rest. 
 Garibaldi. 
 
 Gill. 
 
 Dawn. 
 
 Europa. 
 
 Bacchanal. 
 
 The Condottieri. 
 
 Esau. 
 
 Building of the Ark. 
 
 Love Steering the Boat of Humanity. 
 The Messenger of Peace. 
 Peace and Goodwill. 
 Orpheus and Eurydice. 
 
 In Asia Minor. 
 
 Lady Godiva. 
 
 Watford Railway Bridge. 
 J. S. Copley, Baron Lyndhurst. 
 P. H. Calderon, R.A. 
 
 His Late Majesty King Edward VII. 
 Right Hon. Gerald Balfour. 
 G. F. Watts, R.A., O.M. 
 The Sisters. 
 
 Miss Rachel Gurney. 
 
 The Standard Bearer. 
 
 A Sketch. 
 
 The Earl of Shrewsbury. 
 The Triumph of St. George. 
 Iris. 
 
 A Dedication. 
 
 Orlando and the Witch. 
 Britomart. 
 
 147 
 
 THE WatTTs GALLERY, COMPTON. 
 
Appendix 
 
 The Sun, Earth, and her Dead Daughter, 
 The Moon. 
 
 Fiesole from Careggi. 
 
 Eve. A Trilogy. 
 
 Prince de Joinville. 
 
 A Boy’s Head. 
 
 A Copy (1831). 
 
 Little Miss Hopkins (1836). 
 
 Miss Marietta Lockhart (1846). 
 
 The Wounded Heron. 
 
 Blondel. 
 
 Very Early Study. 
 
 Midsummer Night’s Dream. 
 
 The Drowning of the Doctor of Lorenzo dei 
 Medici (1846). 
 
 Peasant and Child. 
 
 A Derbyshire Cottage. 
 
 A Hawking Scene. 
 
 A Study from Nature. 
 
 Touchstone. 
 
 The Song of the Shirt. 
 
 Sympathy. 
 
 Right Hon. John Burns, 
 
 The Irish Famine. 
 
 Found Drowned. 
 
 Under a Dry Arch. 
 
 John Stuart Mill. 
 
 George Andrews. 
 
 The Idle Child of Fancy. ; 
 
 Mrs. Josephine Butler. 
 
 Claude Goldsmid Montefiore, M.A. 
 
 A Parasite. 
 
 Seen from the Train. 
 
 A Fair Saxon. 
 
Appendix 140, 
 
 69. Chaos. 
 7o. The First Oyster. 
 71. Orpheus and Eurydice. 
 972. Arcadia. 
 73. Evolution. 
 74. Lady Algernon Gordon-Lennox. 
 75. Miss May Prinsep. 
 76. The Prodigal Son. 
 78. Lord Campbell. 
 79. The Prodigal Son. 
 80. Professor Flinders Petrie. 
 81. Industry of Greed. 
 82. Miss Wedderburn. 
 83. Mrs. Langtry. 
 84. The Magdalen at the Foot of the Cross. 
 85. Right Hon. Charles Booth. 
 86. Naples. 
 87. The Wine Bearer. 
 88. Aristides and the Shepherds. 
 89. Study of a Child’s Head. 
 go. A Study in Armour. 
 o1. A Study from the Nude. 
 92. A Study of a Helmet. 
 93. Surrey Woodland. 
 94. Ophelia. 
 95. Sunset on the Alps. 
 96. The Sower of the Systems. 
 97. The End of the Day. 
 98. Mother and Child. 
 99. Eve Repentant. 
 roo. Lucy. 
 tor. Destiny. 
 102. Eve Tempted. 
 
150 
 
 103. 
 104. 
 105. 
 107. 
 108. 
 109. 
 I10. 
 III. 
 112. 
 113. 
 II4. 
 15. 
 116. 
 37: 
 118. 
 119. 
 120. 
 I2r. 
 122. 
 123. 
 124. 
 125. 
 126. 
 127, 
 128. 
 120. 
 130. 
 131. 
 132. 
 133. 
 134. 
 135. 
 
 Appendix 
 
 Study for the Curse of Cain. 
 Angel removing the Curse of Cain. 
 Miss Mary Anderson. 
 
 Uldra. 
 
 The Sphinx. 
 
 The Genius of Greek Poetry. 
 Endymion. 
 
 Olympus on Ida. 
 Prometheus. 
 
 The Nixies’ Foster Daughter. 
 The Creation of Eve. 
 
 The Denunciation of Adam and Eve. 
 Paolo and Francesca. 
 
 Love Triumphant. 
 
 A Recording Angel. 
 
 H. T. Prinsep. 
 
 The Earth. 
 
 The Court of Death. 
 
 After the Deluge. 
 
 The Slumber of the Ages. 
 Outcast of Goodwill. 
 
 The Spirit of Christianity. 
 Study for Love and Life. 
 Green Summer, 
 
 Petraja, Near Florence. 
 Progress. 
 
 Lilian. 
 
 Right Hon. William E. Gladstone. 
 A Fugue. 
 
 J. Joachim. 
 
 Ganymede. 
 
 Near Brighton, 
 
Appendix I5I 
 
 IRELAND : THE NATIONAL GALLERY AND NATIONAL 
 PORTRAIT GALLERY. 
 
 279. Portrait Sketch of the Hon. Mrs. Norton. 
 
 LEEDS: City ART GALLERY. 
 295. Artemis. 
 
 LEICESTER: City ART GALLERY. 
 
 51. Orlando pursuing the Fata Morgana. 
 
 LIVERPOOL: THE WALKER ART GALLERY. 
 
 638. Naples. 
 639. Cupid Asleep. 
 640. Promises. 
 
 MANCHESTER: City ART GALLERY. 
 
 412. The Good Samaritan. 
 
 413. Charles A. Rickards, Esq. 
 
 414. Prayer. 
 
 415. Paolo and Francesca. 
 
 416. The Hon. John Lothrop Motley. 
 
 MANCHESTER: THE WHITWORTH INSTITUTE. 
 
 Love and Death (1877). 
 
 Death Crowning Innocence (1890). 
 Hope (1891). 
 
 Out of the Storm. 
 
 Message of Peace (1891). 
 
 Time, Death and Judgment. 
 
 Love and Life (1890). 
 
152 Appendix 
 
 OxFORD: THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM. 
 The Carrara Mountains. 
 
 AUSTRALIA: ADELAIDE GALLERY. 
 Lord Tennyson (1890) (In Peer’s Robes). 
 
 AUSTRALIA: MELBOURNE NATIONAL GALLERY. 
 Lord Tennyson (1857). 
 
 SCULPTURE. 
 
 NATIONAL GALLERY, MILLBANK, 
 1768. Clytie (Bronze bust). 
 
 KENSINGTON GARDENS, LONDON. 
 Physical Energy (Bronze equestrian statue). 
 
 LINCOLN CLOSE. 
 Statue of Tennyson (1905). 
 
 —_——__. —_ —_ 
 
 APPENDIX II 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 Mrs. M.S. Watts’s Annals ofan Artist’s Life; 2 vols., 
 IgI2 
 Volume III. : Watts’s Writings. 
 
 (Macmillan.) 
 
 PT 
 

 

 
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