Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/wattsOOunse MASTERS IN ART X & 7 p yj^o COMPLETE OUTFIT, $1.00 HEATED BY GAS NO CHEMICALS, BELLOWS, OR BULBS LEFT HAND FREE All Art Material Dealers; or postpaid from WISEMAN MANUFACTURING CO. 140 West Twenty-third St., New York BROWN’S FAMOUS PICTURES Reproduction of famous paintings by old and mod- ern masters. 2,200 sub- jects in Black and White or Sepia. Size, 5*4 x S. One Cent Each 120 FOR $1.00 Our new 48-page catalog, with 1,000 small illustra- tions and two sample pic- tures, sent for 2-ct. stamp. Goo. P. Brown & Co. BEVERLY, MASS. COLORGRAPHS UR new pictures, the “ Colorgraphs, *’ are, as the title suggests, reproductions in color, and will at once be recognized as gems of art, for their faithfulness to the originals in the depth and beauty of coloring brings them close to the possible limits of reproductive art. LIST OF SUBJECTS Madonna del Gran Duca. By Raphael. Madonna of the Chair. By Raphael. Coronation of the Virgin. By Botticelli. St. Anthony of Padua. By Murillo. St. Cecilia. By Raphael. Mary’s Visit to Elizabeth. By Albertinelli. Holy Family. By Andrea del Sarto. Madonna and Child. By Murillo. Christ the Consoler. By Plockhorst. The Good Shepherd. By Plockhorst. Repose in Egypt. By Plockhorst. Head of Christ. From “Christ and the Rich Young Ruler." By Hofmann. COMMENDATION The best carbon print fails to give an echo of the rich har- monies of color which are the chief glory of the masterpieces of pictorial art ; but in presenting to the world your new series of pictures, “ The Colorgraphs," you have rendered a great service, for they reproduce the originals so faithfully both in form and in color that now, for the first time, we may hope by their use to lead our children to know something of the splen- dor of those marvels of the Renaissance. — HENRY TURNER BAILEY, State Supervisor of Drawing of Massachusetts. CT he “ Colorgraphs” are 8 x 10 inches in size, and each is enclosed in a neat deckle-edged portfolio. PRICE, 35 CENTS EACH W. A. WILDE COMPANY BOSTON 120 Boylston Street WESTERN BRANCH: 192 Michigan Ave., Chicago The GREAT PICTURE LIGHT FRINK’S PORTABLE PICTURE REFLECTORS For electric light, meet all requirements for lighting pictures. Every owner of fine paintings could use one or more of these portable reflectors to advantage. The fact that so many have ordered these outfits for their friends is proof that their merits are appreciated. Height, closed, 51 inches; extended, 81 inches. The light from the reflector can be directed at any picture in the room and at any angle. Frink’sPortable Picture Reflector with Telescope Standard No. 7034. brass, polished or antique, with plug and socket for electric lamp $27.50 No. 7035, black iron, with plug and socKct for electric lamp . . $16.50 These special Reflectors are used by all the picture-dealers in New York, ana by private collectors not only in this country, but in Paris, London, Berlin, and other cities When ordering, kindly mention the system of electricity useef. Satisfiction guaranteed. Partiesorder- ing th»*se Reflectors need not hesitate Noa. 7034, 7035 to return them at our expense if not Pat. Dec. 14, '97 found satisfactory . I. P. FRINK, 551 Pearl St., New York City GEO. FRINK SPENCER, Manager Telephone, 860 Franklin In answering advertisements, please mention Masters is Art MASTER'S IN ART EXCLUSIVE WE MAKE AT OUR FACTORY FINE LINES OF SOLID MAHOGANY LIBRARY, DINING-ROOM, AND CHAMBER FURNITURE From original drawings by our own designer. These pieces are ready for immediate delivery. NO WAITING. Prices are rarely more than that of the ordinary factory-made furniture, and 40 PER CENT LESS THAN FOR CUSTOM WORK Inasmuch as these pieces are not shown elsewhere, they afford an opportunity for exclusiveness at nominal prices that is eagerly seized. Come in especially to see what we offer in this direction. If you are interested in Solid Mahogany, Hand-made Furni- ture, kindly correspond with THE COBB-EASTMAN COMPANY The Cobb-Eastman Company FURNITURE, DRAPERIES, RUGS, AND INTERIOR DECORATIONS hi to 117 Washington St., opp. Adams Square Subway Station In answering advertisements, please mention Masters in Art / MAHTKHM IN AMT 1*1. AT K f JMOTOOdAf* ■» “OllTM [a] W A TTH i.ov * a \ ii i . 1 1 i NATION \ I . i i \ I . I . I 1 1 Y 1 1 II I I I H II AIM* .n M in \ MAHTKHH IN A HT YM.ATK II rMorooRA^M at hOuim [ft J \\ ATTH l.nv K AMI I If-: A Til NATION Al. «i M.I.MO UK Mill 11^ II All I . I « » N I M i % a WATTS DIANA AND ENDYMION P1UVATE CO I SECTION’ « ENULAN U MASTEHH IN A IIT IM.ATK IV ^»oroo(*fH IV HOLIVM [ill W ATTfl PIIIITIIAIT III* MIIH. l»KI(i \ W V MUIAM nw \ Kll II V I II I JIII.N Id Y W V \ nil A \|, H \ I.IHIIC II Y , I* M. i. \ N l> if A HTKHM I N' AMT IM.ATK ^MOTOOKA^H •/ mOU [ill V W AT I H IIIIMK N \ THIN A I. *• A 1.1. Kli V «»l IIIIITIHII A IIT, l.n.N I H»N M AHTKHH I \ AMT l»l IIV IMIKTII Ml UK I . A MV II KN If V W ATTH \ I, Kill II, 1.0 HI i II \ \ V HO ,\ HUM) KhKI, I \HT\Olt I'Mtlt. I N • . I INI) 1MU VAT K COliLI'XTION PORTRAIT OF WATTS FROM A PHOTOGRAPH Watts was below medium height and slightly built, but, even in his old age, erect of carriage. His features were clear-cut and regular; his expression thoughtful and marked by the utmost kindliness and refinement. In appearance he was eminently picturesque. When at work in his studio he frequently wore a long loose blouse, like a carter’s frock, and at all times a crimson skull cap. The photograph re- produced above was taken by Frederick Hollyer, in London, when the artist was about sixty-five years old. [22] MASTERS IN ART (Sreoffle ^prcirericfe ®8^att0 BORN 1817: DIED 19 04 ENGLISH SCHOOL G EORGE FREDERICK WATTS was born in London on February 23, 1817, of a family which claimed Welsh descent. His father, who had re- moved from Hereford to London early in the century, in the hope of bettering his fortunes, and who was a man of scientific tastes and some inventive faculty, was by profession a musician, and added to his scanty livelihood by tuning pianos. Of Watts’s boyhood few records remain. It is said that almost as soon as he could talk he began to draw, copying when very young the quaint prints in an old Queen Anne prayer-book; and that when he was twelve, fas- cinated by romance and legendary lore, he painted a series of pictures illus- trating scenes from Scott’s ‘Waverly Novels,’ and made a spirited sketch of an incident in Homer’s ‘Iliad’ — the struggle for the body of Patroclus. At fifteen Watts entered the Academy schools, but finding the teaching there unsatisfactory, remained but a few weeks. A fondness for sculpture then led him to the studio of William Behnes, where he copied plaster casts and watched Behnes at his work, but received from him no direct instruc- tion. His real teachers, he always said, were the Elgin marbles, and he would spend hours in the British Museum absorbed in the study of the beauty of those Phidian sculptures which became his standard for style and form. When barely twenty, Watts exhibited at the Royal Academy two portraits and a picture entitled ‘A Wounded Heron.’ Encouraged by their reception, he soon afterwards contributed to the annual exhibition of the Academy sub- jects from Shakespeare and Boccaccio. But it was not until 1842, when he was twenty-five, that his first real success was attained. In that year a com- petition was held in London for the decoration of the halls of the new Houses of Parliament, and Watts, whose name was then almost unknown, entered the lists with many of the leading artists of the day, and sent in a cartoon of ‘Caractacus led in Triumph through the Streets of Rome,’ which won for him a first-class prize of £300. This design was for some reason never car- ried out in fresco, but with the competition prize-money he was enabled to realize a long-cherished dream of going to Italy, and soon afterwards started on his travels. Arrived in Florence, he found a friend and patron in Lord Holland, then [ 23 ] 24 MASTERS IN ART British ambassador at the court of Tuscany, and in the literary and artistic circle which was wont to assemble at Lord Holland’s house, Casa Ferroni, in the city, and at his summer home among the hills outside of Florence, the young painter was ever a welcome guest. Four years passed before Watts returned to England — years which were by no means idle, for although he did not spend his time in copying the works of the old masters in the galleries of Italy, he studied them in his own way, absorbing their beauty, and finding inspiration in Florentine form and line, and in the coloring of the Venetians. Portraits of Lord and Lady Holland, and of many of their distinguished guests, were painted by him at this period, and on the walls of their summer villa, Villa Careggi, he painted a fresco rep- resenting the execution of the physician who was accused of poisoning his master, Lorenzo de’ Medici, to whom the villa had once belonged. When, in 1847, news was received from London that a second competition for decorations of the Houses of Parliament was to be held, Watts returned to England to again become a candidate. To his astonishment he was again successful, and a first-class prize of £500 was awarded him for a large and vigorous composition of ‘King Alfred inciting his Subjects to prevent the Landing of the Danes.’ This cartoon was bought by the English govern- ment, and hung in a committee-room at Westminster, and Watts was soon afterwards commissioned to paint a fresco of ‘ St. George and the Dragon ’ for the upper waiting-hall of the House of Lords. This last work, begun in 1848, was not finished until five years later. It may still be seen, though injured by London fog and smoke, in the Palace of Westminster. In 1856 Watts again left England; this time to accompany the expedition sent out under Sir Charles Newton to examine and verify many ancient sites of tombs and temples in Greece and Asia Minor. The expedition occupied a year and a half, and even after the return of the party to England, Watts, who was not connected with it in any official capacity, pursued his travels in different parts of Greece and Italy, strengthening his love for classic art and his devotion to Greek sculpture. Not long after his return to England, in pursuance of a desire that public buildings in London should be adorned with monumental works of art em- bodying lofty thoughts, he offered to decorate for the barristers of Lincoln s Inn, without remuneration, the north side of their great dining-hall, with a fresco representing ‘The School of Legislature.’ This work, the largest and finest of its kind in England, was completed in 1859, and, as a mark of their appreciation of his labors, the barristers presented Watts with £500 and a gold cup. The artist’s generosity and public spirit, however, met elsewhere with less cordial reception, and his offer to decorate at his own expense the large hall at Euston Station with a series of frescos illustrating the progress of the world was rejected by the directors of the railway. Disappointed in his attempt to set forth his conceptions on a colossal scale in fresco, Watts turned his attention to the execution of paintings which should express the great truths he felt it to be the mission of art to promul- gate. “I want to teach people how to live,’ he would say, how to make use [ 24 ] WATTS 25 of all their powers, to work, and hope, and enjoy life; not to be mere slave's and drudges, but to care for something higher than money-making and self- ish pleasure.” For many years Watts exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy, and no- table exhibitions of his works were often held at the Grosvenor Gallery and the New Gallery, London. In 1884-85 some fifty of his pictures were sent to this country and shown at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. From the time when he began to paint regularly in London it becomes difficult to fol- low him chronologically, for it was his custom to keep a picture on hand for many years, occupying himself with several designs at the same time, work- ing at each one little by little according to his mood or fancy. His large can- vas of ‘The Court of Death,’ for instance, was in his studio for many years, and was exhibited in 1896-97 in an unfinished state, only receiving the final touches and the artist’s signature on his eighty-sixth birthday. It was as a portrait-painter that Watts’s reputation was primarily achieved. Compelled in the first place to devote himself to portraiture in order to gain a living, he always declared that attention to this branch of art was the best discipline for an imaginative painter, and when it was no longer necessary to do so gladly turned from his ideal subjects to paint those portraits which alone would have made his name famous. Many of these are portrayals of men eminent in every walk of life — statesmen, lawyers, artists, musicians, men of letters and divines — whom the painter himself asked to sit for him that he might give to the English nation presentments of the leading men of his century. A collection of these portraits, the gift of the artist, is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London, while to the National Gallery of British Art (Tate Gallery), Watts presented more than twenty of the finest of his allegorical, or ideal, subjects. Among these may be mentioned ‘ I he Mino- taur,’ ‘Mammon,’ ‘Love and Death,’ ‘Love and Life,’ ‘ I he Dweller in the Innermost,’ ‘The Messenger,’ ‘Time, Death, and Judgment,’ and ‘Hope.’ The indifference shown for many years by the general public towards this latter form of his art — a form in which he had so firm and unshaken a faith as the only kind to elevate the tone of English painting — never embittered his spirit nor caused him to swerve from his high purpose of raising the art of his country to the lofty level of her history and literature. The most modest of men, desirous ever of self-effacement, he was yet always ready and eager to serve the public by giving freely of those works which he had painted, because, as he himself simply expressed it, “he had something to say.” In a life so wholly devoted to art as was that of Watts, so marked by single- ness of purpose and absorption in carrying out the ideals he had set before himself — a life, moreover, almost monastic in its simplicity, regularity, and seclusion from the outside world — there is but little in the way of incident to relate. He was beloved by his friends, of whom he had many, and rev- erenced by all who knew him, but he never cared for society as that term is popularly understood. His marriage to Miss Ellen Terry, the actress, in comparatively early life, was dissolved shortly after it had taken place, and in 1886 he married Miss [ 25 ] 26 MASTERS IN ART Mary Fraser-Tytler, of Inverness-shire — a marriage which brought rare happiness into his life. Nearly half of each year Watts spent at Little Holland House, his home in Melbury Road, Kensington, London, where a gallery containing many of his famous works was open to the public on every Saturday and Sunday throughout the late spring and summer. As soon, however, as the first chilly days of autumn came, the painter would go to his other home, Limners- lease, a picturesque house near Compton, among the Surrey hills. In this quiet spot he carried on his work, rising very early in the morning, as was his custom, and frequently beginning to paint before four o’clock, so that by noon he would have accomplished an ordinary day’s work. His method of painting was unusual. His colors were ground especially for him and kept dry in jars ready for use when needed, when they were mixed with the requisite quantity of linseed-oil diluted with some essential oil. He laid his tints on thick and dry, one alongside of another like mosaic, mingling them at the edges but never putting light or bright colors over darker ones, in order that in course of time the brilliancy of the background should show through and his paint- ings acquire the qualities of stained glass. He made, we are told, no prepara- tory studies for his pictures, but, having thought out his subject, sketched it at once upon the canvas with his brush, making use of no palette nor mahl- stick, nor, indeed, in many cases, of any model to help him; and if, as in his portraits, a model were before him, refraining from strict adherence to the ac- tual, lest by a close study of the body the spirit should be lost, which in his estimation counted for more than any technical excellence. In spite of a delicate constitution, indeed, according to his own statement, because of it (for his realization of physical limitations had early taught him the necessity of careful living), Watts was able to accomplish far more than many men of strong physique. Although obliged to avoid violent exercise, he was, until within a few years of his death, an admirable horseman, and spent much time in the open air, riding and walking. He was abstemious in regard to food and drink and never smoked, always claiming that greater things had been accomplished in the world before the discovery of tobacco than had been done since. As a host he was delightful; no one of the many visitors at Little Holland House or Limnerslease failed to find a welcome, nor left without being im- pressed by the power and charm of his personality. A gifted conversation- alist, his manners were of the old school — truly courtly — and well merited for him the title “the Signor,” by which he was affectionately known among his friends. From time to time Watts turned his attention to sculpture, for which he had always had a fondness. Of his works in this direction a bust of Clytie, a large equestrian statue of Hugh Lupus, the early ancestor of the Grosvenors, and a striking group entitled ‘ Physical Energy,’ which when cast in bronze will be placed on the grave of Cecil Rhodes in Africa, are among the most prominent. Of public and official recognition a larger share came to Watts than a man [ 26 ] WATTS 27 so retiring by nature could desire. In 1867 he was elected an Associate and in the same year a full member of the Royal Academy, an honor which his disinclination for personal notice at first caused him to decline, but which he was finally prevailed upon to accept. From Oxford he received the degree of Doctor of Civil Law; from Cambridge that of Doctor of Laws. France con- ferred upon him the Cross of the Legion of Honor; Italy made him a knight of the Order of San Luigi. Twice a baronetcy in England was offered to him, but each time firmly and with all respect declined. It was only when the Order of Merit was established, on the coronation of King Edward vn., that he could be induced to accept any mark of public honor from his country. To the last Watts was actively engaged with his art, and not until he had counted full eighty-seven years did the end come. After an illness of only a few days he died very peacefully, of bronchitis, on July 1, 1904, at his home Little Holland House, Kensington. A memorial service was held in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, and, accord- ing to the painter’s expressed wish, his body was cremated, and his ashes buried in the cemetery at Compton near his favorite Surrey home of Lim- nerslease. %l)t 91rt of W&ttQ M Y 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. — george FREDERICK WATTS M. H. SPIELMANN ‘NINETEENTH CENTURY’ 1897 I T must be recognized at the outset that if Watts’s art is to be understood — I do not say in the first instance, accepted — his particular standpoint, both artistic and philosophic, must be made clear. From the beginning his prin- ciples have never swerved — principles that include the restoration of art to her true and noblest function, and the personal self-sacrifice of every worker in the commonwealth for the common good. While denying to mere tech- nical dexterity the supremacy over intellectual qualities which it has usurped, he has held — and spent his life in demonstrating — that it is in the power of paint to stir in man something more sublime than is possible to a simple sen- suous appreciation of tones and values, color and line; and while himself seek- ing these things in the highest perfection possible to him, he has sought to ex- press in painter-language the thoughts and emotions that occupy Ins mind. . . . “Art,” exclaimed Paul Verlaine in an oracular moment to his disciples, “is the being absolutely oneself.” The epigram is incomplete; but so far as it goes it may be applied to the art of Watts. Whether noble or ignoble, we usually take a long while to find ourselves out sufficiently to become, even should we dare, “absolutely ourselves.” Put Watts succeeded early, and has [271 28 MASTERS I N ART been so much “himself” that all schools and movements from preraphael- itism to impressionism, he has seen come and go, and has remained un- touched by any one of them — still less concerned by any passing fashion, though greatly moved by waves of genuine feeling passing over the nation. These considerations cannot, of course, blind us to faults or stifle criticism, for all the sense of noble patriotism they convey; but they exact nevertheless a more respectful attention for the purely spiritual claims of his work than the young bloods whose cry is “Art for Art” are usually willing to allow. Aspiration and intention — these claim the first consideration of Watts. If the thought to be worked out in a picture be but elevating and ennobling, the subject and even the work itself are regarded as of relatively little importance; they are his sign-posts to the thought to be expressed. Then and only then is his concern awakened to composition of line and rhythmic beauty, and to nobility and character of form, with due reference to artistic principles — for it is fitting that the sign-posts be fashioned as perfect as possible. Finally, color, harmony, and dignity are imported, that the work may result in a mon- umental whole. But the picture resulting is not necessarily allegorical; it is, more accurately speaking, suggestive. . . . Years ago Mr. Ruskin declared that Watts was the one painter of thought and history in England. But the artist in a measure repudiates the implied compliment. He makes no claim to be a painter of history; for history-paint- ing is not much more than elaborate genre, resulting in what are practically “ costume pieces,” that leave us cold, if not indifferent. He is never, therefore, historical in the accepted sense. Literary he may be; but even then not simply narrative; and he always maintains the artistic and poetic sense. Yet, what- ever his deserts, Watts seems to care little for consideration as an artist at all — nor as a preacher either, nor as a teacher. He is rather a thinker who would have all men think for themselves; a man of noble dreams who would have those dreams reality; a seer to whom nature has been but partially kind in bestowing on him the gift of elevated conception which he would rather put into words with the pen than with the brush translate them into form. To that cause perhaps we must attribute his passionate desire to raise painting, intellectually, to the side of poetry, and, at the same time, to combat the idea that “Art for Art” is the only principle, or even the best. “I do not deny,” he wrote to me many years ago on this very subject, “ that beautiful technique is sufficient to constitute an extremely valuable achievement; but it can never alone place a work of art on the level of the highest effort in poetry; and by this it should stand. That any work of mine can do this I do not for a moment claim; no one knows better than I do how defective all my efforts are. But I cannot give up the hope that a direction is indicated not unworthy, and that a vein of poetical and intellectual suggestion is laid bare which may be worked with more effect by some who will come after.” . . . No section of Watts’s art, it seems to me, illustrates more completely his strength and his limitations than that of portraiture. It is universally allowed that in portrait-painting realism is the dominant note; so that, as Watts is be- yond all else an idealist, it might have been supposed that his greatest quality [ 28 ] WATTS 29 might have presented itself as an insuperable defect. The fact is, however, that the word “ realism ” is a term a good deal misused and misapplied. It has been usurped by the modern French school and appropriated generally by an as- pect of art so different from that not only of Watts, but equally of the whole healthy tendency of the English school, that for distinction’s sake the quality of his portraiture may best be expressed by the paradoxical term of “ideal realism,” and so cast into danger of being confounded with “idealism” pure and simple. The lights and shadows that played upon the face in the searching studio- light, the wrinkle on the forehead, and the wart upon the cheek would not suffice to satisfy the more thoughtful quality of Watts’s mind. While accord- ing to facial resemblance all it is in his power to render, he aims chiefly at realizing his sitters’ habits of thought, dispositions, and characters, as these might reveal themselves upon their faces. His work in portraiture, therefore, shows a strongly marked individuality of an impersonal kind. It has become sculpturesque and monumental in character, and rich in beauty, in spite of the fact that the painter has never stooped to use that most popular of all por- trait-painters’ color-mediums — flattery. . . . Although symbolism is Watts’s most obvious characteristic, it is the char- acteristic not of the painter, but of the thinker. If he were told, as in fact he often has been told, that his work is literary, symbolic, and not to be judged as “art” at all, he would assuredly accept the judgment as welcome praise. The painter’s craft, pure and simple, is to him the craft of the painter and nothing more, and its skill, something to employ to good, and not to little purpose. It is one of the greatest merits of his pictures that they are almost elemental in their simplicity, and that in whatever quarter they may be exhibited they attract alike the cultivated and the uneducated. It is not only that there is a strong feeling among the populace for the ideal, the elevated, and the alle- gorical; it is also that his art contains in itself so many sympathetic ele- ments. It is Greek in its philosophic spirit and in its display of material beauty, and Christian in its clear appeal to man’s righteousness and love. It is to be observed — a remarkable circumstance in a painter who has de- voted a lifetime to ethical and religious thought — that he has never dealt with dogma or doctrine. So unsectarian is he that he has always avoided in his work even the ordinary theological emblems and symbols; indeed, not so much as a cross is to be seen in any of his pictures. He paints Righteousness, but not Religion; and personifies Sin, but never as the Devil. “You must not speak of my ‘theology,’” he said once, when I let fall the word; “it should rather be called religious philosophy. For I do not admit that reason can be banished at the behest of belief.” It is wholly absurd to suggest that he is a “mystic,” as he is sometimes reproached with living, lie doubtless believes that there is something mysterious — the spirit of a great Creator — in all living things, and most of all in man as the greatest in crea- tion, dowered with the greatest brain power and intellect. “ It may shock you,” he said on another occasion, “but I feel that one creed is as good as [ 29 ] 30 MASTERS IN ART another, and that Nature, Divinity, Humanity, are to me almost convertible terms.” From this philosophic love of humanity springs the fervid, almost passion- ate, earnestness with which he seeks to combat the Greek idea of Death — of Death the Destroyer; of the grim and grisly specter of Diirer’s ‘Dance.’ His obvious aim has been to impress us with a theme to which he returns again and again in his more lofty compositions, giving us, not Death itself, but rather the Angel of Death — inevitable, inexorable, irresistible, but stripped of the dread and horror with which painters have loved to invest it. . . . Into the technique of Watts’s painting it is not needful here to enter, either to criticize or describe. But in explanation, not in excuse, of the artist’s occa- sional departure from academic proportions (which many decry as one of the seven cardinal sins in art) it may be said that, while correct anatomy and ex- cellence of figure-drawing are no more despised by him than by any other master, accuracy, as such, occupying his attention in a minor degree than the main lines of his composition, must yield, if it clash, to the dominating sig- nificance of the work. There are qualities in his pictures to be looked for other than the purity and range of color — the variety of texture which is needed to support the movement of light and atmosphere, the broken surface, which other artists so carefully avoid, the outline which is never insisted on, and is only lost to be found again, and, above all, that mystery which as a quality in painting is the one vital superiority which modern art can boast over that of the great masters of old. Watts’s art is the picture of his life; a life in which independence of char- acter and elevated thought throw into relief the highest philanthropy and pa- triotism of the perfect citizen; a life which is sustained in its sad outlook upon the grim and threatening future by a simple faith in his fellow-man, like the star shining in his picture of ‘Ararat,’ or the lyre-string answering to the maid- en’s touch in his masterpiece of ‘Hope.’ ROYAL CORTISSOZ ‘THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW’ 1904 W ATTS was the one painter of his time in England to whom the idea was a controlling force, so saturating his art, in all its relations, that you could not approach him in any of his moods without instantly realizing that he had something to say to you, and that this something supplied the picture in question with its chief reason for existing. None of his fellow-countrymen, with the possible exception of William Blake, ever conveyed quite the same impression of art surcharged with thought. Men like Leighton, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and Millais seem beside him the merest story-tellers. The only point which he ever had in common with them was an inability to acquire complete technical proficiency. In all other respects he occupied a place apart, exer- cising unique power in the creation of beautiful and significant images, every one of them stamped with the quality of his brain and appealing to us as sym- bols, not as painted things. . . . Watts must be considered largely as an isolated phenomenon, if the true [ 30 ] WATTS 3 1 outlines of his artistic character are to be apprehended. There is nothing in his style that can be identified as due to the influence of this or that master. In his youth he had no instruction that amounted to anything, either in the draw- ing-school of the Royal Academy, which he attended for a time, or in the stu- dio of the sculptor William Behnes, which he entered as a kind of observer. The Elgin marbles are said to have made a deep impression upon him, but they did not make him a classicist. When he obtained a prize in a public competition with a decorative design, and used the money to go to Italy, he stayed there four years without transforming himself into a neo-Italian. Yet, if we are not to make his originality too unnatural a thing, but must link him somewhere with the masters of painting, it is to the great Venetians that I should say he was, in a measure, akin. He understood and, I believe, loved their language, their large stately way of putting things, and their heroic but restrained passion. Form, in his eyes, as in theirs, took on a certain grandeur, was marmoreal and even hierophantic. Moreover, for him, as for them, it was of little worth, save in so far as it lent itself to the more nobly dramatic issues of the imaginative world. . . . For a man untrained in the schools, Watts had an extraordinary command over plastic forms, and could, indeed, mold them to his purposes with an au- thority greater than that of many a skilled Academician. It was not in the subtleties of modeling that he excelled. On the contrary, his surfaces were apt to be coarsely handled; his contours were roughly generalized, rather than ex- quisitely drawn, and his flesh-tints were notoriously muddy. But in the broad massing of forms he was a master; in flinging the sinewy limbs of his men into just the right attitudes, in lending to his mighty deep-bosomed women an air like that of Michelangelo’s solemn Amazons, he was not only powerful but fluent. You feel that the man who could treat the human figure in this fashion, nude or draped, had an almost Greek delight, and skill, in solving the most difficult of all artistic problems. Only, for the joy of the Greek in the beauty of form as an end in itself, we have, in Watts, an essentially modern perturba- tion of soul, a constant concern for the emotions under which these sentient beings, whose bodies he delineates with so facile a hand, may be laboring as he paints them. Nay, they must quiver with emotion, else he cannot paint them at all. We have seen how he avoided practical study of the nude, how the Elgin marbles took the place of the living models in his experience. One feels, vaguely, in studying his work, that in his eyes the portrayal of the human form for its own sake must have seemed a kind of sacrilege. No; for him the heroes of mythology or of Scripture, the figures he drew from old or modern literature, and those in which he embodied his own reflections on life and death, were symbols or nothing. This is to be regretted in so far as it placed a drag upon his technical advancement; but it is to be valued, on the other hand, for the stimulus that it must have given to his inventive faculty. Eager to pack his art with meaning, and too original, as he was too lofty of mind, to rely on lifeless accessories for the elucidation of his idea, he made that plastic gift to which I have referred a means to a spiritual end, giving to form an elo- quence all his own. . . . [311 32 MASTERS IN ART Once, in the catalogue to an exhibition of his, he said: “The great majority of these works must be regarded rather as hieroglyphs than anything else, cer- tainly not as more than symbols, which all art was in the beginning, and which everything is that is not directly connected with physical conditions.” I dare say that, with this seeming warrant, there will not be wanting expositors, by and by, to tell us all manner of things about what this man of dreams and deep thought put into his pictures. But there does not really seem to be anything very dark about his “hieroglyphs.” Take almost any of his pictures, ‘Char- ity,’ ‘The Throne of Death,’ ‘Diana and Endymion,’ ‘The Death of Abel,’ ‘Mammon,’ ‘The Minotaur,’ ‘Sir Galahad,’ ‘Love and Death,’ and so on through the long list. I do not pretend that every one of them is an open book. But, taking Watts’s mythological, allegorical, and illustrative designs all to- gether, there is surprisingly little mysticism in them; they are never wilfully obscure; they stand, first and last, for the effort of a noble spirit to comfort and cheer mankind with fine ideas, set forth in direct fashion. Incidentally, the artist — since he is, after all, an artist as well as a teacher — will exert the charm of beautiful form and monumental design. Incidentally, though he has not the gift of color, but is, on the contrary, always at odds with his palette, and cannot help leaving his tones stringy and impure, without any of the luminos- ity which one feels the gods ought to have granted him, he will do his best to throw a sensuous glamour over his canvas. But, above all, he will enforce upon you the sublimity of life and death, the magic of poetry, the thought and feeling that makes art always, in the last resort, a matter of humanity as well as of paint and brushes. If these preoccupations of his tell constantly in his pictures, they are hardly less effective in his portraits, which are so clearly works “of the center,” so rich in the qualities of the painter for whom surfaces are only veils but dimly hiding the soul beneath, that they would have given him the rank he enjoyed even if he had never painted anything else. . . . Some of his early portraits recall the French Academicians of the time. The savor of formalism in them is in curious contrast to the intellectual vitality they possess. Watts was not long, however, in broadening his method, and the tendency in the great mass of portraiture by which he is chiefly known to- day, the fruit of his riper years, is all in the direction of bolder modeling and looser brushwork. He gives a profounder rendering of structure, and envelops it in a richer atmosphere. From the start he seems to have gravitated toward types of mature and brilliant manhood, rather than toward feminine charm. When he did execute portraits of women, he made them like his portraits of men, studies of character, wasting no time or energy on the petty effects so dear to the fashionable portrait-painter. One among the comparatively small number of these paintings, the famous full-length of the Hon. Mrs. Percy Wyndham, is a portrait of the modern grande dame, which for dignity and high-bred sentiment might stand beside the historic canvases of the Venetian school. . . . But for the fullest measure of Watts’s genius as a portrait-painter, we must still go to that wonderful array of canvases in which he commemo- rates the statesmen, poets, and other public men of the Victorian era. [ 32 ] WATTS 33 He was their “limner in extraordinary,’’ the interpreter of their genius, and, so far as their personalities were concerned, the custodian of their fame. He had it in his hand to send his sitters down to posterity as so many “frail ten- ements of clay,” or as the embodiment of certain qualities of mind or soul; and somehow, in spite of the technical limitations which always hampered him, he followed with remarkable success the course which his idealistic nature inevi- tably dictated to him. . . . In thus creating permanent memorials of the great Englishmen of his time, he not only put the individual in his debt, but laid the nation under a heavy obligation, and it is perhaps worth while to ask what his countrymen did to show their gratitude. They praised him without stint. They freely accepted the gifts he made to more than one public institution, his splendid addition to the stores of the National Portrait Gallery being received with positive enthusiasm. Twice a baronetcy was offered to him — only to be refused on both occasions. The Academy was quick to honor itself in honoring him, and he was not without the usual official recognition, both at home and abroad, which an artist of his distinction would be bound to receive. Yet England never gave him the oppor- tunity to paint upon the walls of her public buildings those colossal decora- tions in which his genius might, perhaps, have found its best outlet. . . . Are the English to be blamed ? To approach this point is to approach the whole question of Watts’s standing as an artist, to ask whether he was one of those commanding geniuses who enforce themselves upon their age, or one of the less fortunate men in whose characters there are hiatuses, imperfections, lim- itations, which act forever as bars to the achievement of unquestioned fame. There can be no doubt that Watts belonged to this latter class, and it is juster, I think, frankly to recognize that fact than to criticize the English for leaving a talent unexploited at their gates. Great he was, with the greatness of a fine intellect and a pure imagination; his moral fervor reacted upon his work with results that it would be silly to group with those of the ordinary painter of didactic anecdotes; and all through the tangible fabrics of his creating, in the dramatic sweep of his design, and in the nobility of his forms, you discern a beauty that has the accent of great- ness upon it. But Watts was not a great painter; he did not reach in drawing, modeling, and color the plane of the great masters, and without that uplift he failed, necessarily, to impose himself absolutely upon his generation, to bend his countrymen to his will, or to found a school. ROBFRT DE LA SIZERANNF. ‘ENGLISH CONTEMPORARY ART’ W ATTS once said to a friend, “I paint ideas, not things.’ 1 he saying requires definition. Ideas, if they are not the whole of art, are the whole of Watts. They have inspired his career; they arc his reason for ex- istence. If he paints, it is not for his own pleasure, nor for that of others. 1 le paints to serve his generation. He paints to teach cockneys morality, and to make club-men consider their destinies. It is as if an angel had come down from heaven and said to him, “Work! No matter if your pictures are bad, f33] 34 MASTERS IN ART you must save souls.” For the proper mission of art is to urge men to higher things and thoughts, and, to fulfil this mission, the artist strives to incarnate in his art an echo of the vital interests of life; something that may suggest more to human nature as a whole than the purely artistic conception of his subject. . . . And not only in his subject and in the aim he pursues, but still more by the method he employs, is Watts an idealist. He is guided in everything by ideas, not by things; not by the idea of beauty, but of appropriateness, of dignity, of stability. He never chooses a subject for mere beauty of form, for he does not consider form in the first place. His drawing and coloring are also governed by his independent ideas of the impressions made by art. For serious subjects he employs serious coloring, and for other subjects different tones. Then, as it is not fitting that eternal truths should be expressed in language that fades like the grass of the field, he proscribes all mediums, all dilutions of the oils or of any other substance, all mixtures of colors, of the durability of which he is not assured. He lays his colors on dry and clean without moistening them, touch by touch, stroke by stroke, as in pastels. No matter if it looks less well; it is more lasting. His drawing is even more inspired by a preconceived idea than by nature. He does indeed arrange a model before him, but he does not look at it. If he were to gaze at it, the living being might alter his preconceived idea of the myth, and it is the myth alone that concerns him. There is a patriotic idea, too, which has guided his hand in the grand and solemn outlines of his figures. To do noble work was the first ambition of his youth, the first cry from his heart to his only master, the marbles of Phidias. Why to do noble work ? Because it is more lovely than vulgar work ? No! Because it is more honorable for England. When Watts appeared the whole genius of the painters of that day was de- voted to painting in detail the costumes of Goldsmith’s comic characters, or to producing the gloss on the coat of a dog in a kennel. It might have been said that the English had never been moved by the great scenes of history, or by the high ideals of philosophy. And yet they had a noble literature, a lofty school of poetry in no wise inferior to that of other nations. Was it possible that their painting should continue to persuade the world that only petty pleasures and paltry passions prevailed in the United Kingdom ? No! At any cost England should have a heroic art. The painter might fail, but he would have shown at least that if the English are not great artists they are good citizens. Sometimes a victory is unnecessary, but a struggle is inevitable. Watts, striving to recall to life on his canvas the mutilated marbles of Phidias, was like Lord Cardigan charging at Balaklava. It was a foolish, unheard of, hope- less attempt; success was impossible, and he knew it. But the honor of Eng- land required the attempt to be made in the sight of all nations. The general threw his men forward to their destruction on the Russian guns and bayonets; Watts paints his great mythological compositions, over which he will spend his life unsuccessfully. [ 34 ] WATTS 35 For if we turn to his work from the consideration of his ideas, we shall ex- perience, at first, most painful surprise and profound disappointment. He is said to draw with his brush and to fix his outlines in color; it is even said that he thus transfers the figure of the model directly to his composition without any intermediate studies, in order not to be influenced for too long a time by the real forms he has under his eye. And his drawing betrays such haste. His figures are like great trees blown into strange contact by the wind. They bend and sway and recover themselves by sudden jerks. He mingles clouds, grass, birds, rays of sunlight, veils, scarfs, folds, floating locks, embraces, contor- tions, and swoons. There is no knowing where all these lines of crude color are going, whence they come, what they mean. Suddenly his figures turn half of tbeir bodies; the trunk turns for example, while the legs remain stationary in their first position. Forged in thick layers of paint, the limbs are undevel- oped and displeasing. As to the soft heavy draperies, blue or gray on glowing grounds, they twist and fold, and break up, and divide into a thousand flow- ing channels. There is a superfluity of folds. The robes are surplices. The sleeves are plaits. The colors are all out of harmony. Sometimes the violence of one tone diminishes that of another, and a Venetian harmony is the result, but that never lasts long. The accompanying colors are so out of tune that, in spite of the beauty of the duet, the whole produces the effect of a discord, and you are ready to turn away, persuaded that there is nothing worth waiting longer to listen to. And yet you linger, for while Watts’s color distracts the eye, his ideas penetrate to the depth of the soul, and slowly arouse something that was sleeping there. These myths, so laboriously brought forth by the artist, apart from all picturesque feeling, by the mere strength of his character and the single energy of his heart, we recognize with surprise are human, are of the present day, are alive. Some years ago, when I visited the South Kensington Museum, London, for the first time, I took by chance the staircase leading to the library . 1 At that time I held the conviction that mythological painting was a false, deca- dent, commonplace style; that out of such impersonal figures as Death, jus- tice, Time, and Love, nothing more could nowadays be made than a spiritless decoration for the ceilings of a public budding or of a confectioner’s shop. I then thought, like many others, that to infuse fresh life-blood, and moving, speaking feeling, into these myths, worn out by soaring into abstractions, they must of necessity be metamorphosed into portions of contemporary life. I still held this opinion when I mounted the first step of that staircase; by the time I had reached the last step I no longer believed that mythological paint- ing was dead. What was there between these two opinions ? Two pictures by Watts. It is true that these two myths were chosen from those which lose nothing of their fascination as the world loses its sense of mystery. On one side hung ‘Love and Death;’ on the other, ‘Love and Life.’ To attract our eyes with curiosity to pictures of beings who have never existed, who merely incorpo- rate a condition of ourselves, they must be beings whose essence we ardently 1 Several of Watts’s pictures, placed temporarily in the South Kensington Museum, then hung on the walls of this staircase. 36 MASTERS IN ART desire to look into; and, if we know that it is wholly imaginary, it is enough if we also know that nothing in life is more powerful, more inevitable, than these conventional beings. Science and modern criticism have put to flight many allegorical figures, and have dried up many founts of poetry; but two myths have retained all their power and fascination over us, Love and Death. . . . As long as love lasts poetry will live, even under an abstract form; as long as death lasts religion will not die; and wishing to put new life into the myths, Watts chose the two grandest and most attractive of them, those which science can neither explain away nor lessen to the minds of men — Love and Death. But this choice would not have sufficed had not the master of symbolism brought a new and deep feeling to his presentation of them in default of great esthetic qualities. Watts is the painter of Love and Death; but not of hateful or ridiculous Death, of the skeleton let out of an anatomical cabinet who heads the ‘Dance of Death,’ nor of that braggart and tricksy Love, the urchin made to be whipped, who plays tricks on Thorwaldsen’s nymphs, or pricks M. Bougue- reau’s young shepherds with paper arrows. His Love is manly and his Death benevolent. The former sustains life, and the latter heals it. Llis winged god is the powerful god who makes hearts beat ready for sacrifice; his veiled god- dess is the watchful mother who lulls the bodies of her children to rest. And when the aged artist, inspired by a touch of genius, represents this Love and this Death great as he has conceived them, beautiful as he has made them, such as he has revived them, then he reaches the climax of his work and of his thought. The little Love, who fights like a sentinel, who braces himself, who refuses manfully to let the gloomy visitor pass him by, is noble and great; he is satisfied that life is a boon to him whom he is protecting; he would preserve it for him; he does his duty. But great and noble is this phantom also, which advances so calmly, and which seems to say to the courageous child, “You know not what you are doing. You have accompanied and supported him in rugged paths; I will lead him to the kingdom where there is no more weari- ness. Your part is done; let me accomplish mine. You can do less for him than I can. You dazzle, but I enlighten; you guide, but I gather in; you con- sole, but I cure.” One day Michelangelo met Raphael with his pupils in a Roman garden, and the old man jested with the younger, saying, “You go about surrounded with people, as if you were the head of an army.” “And you,” replied Ra- phael, “go about alone — like the executioner.” This saying might be applied to Watts also; to his art which no man fol- lows, to the awe he inspires, to the profound impression he makes on the im- agination. Thinking over all the artists who work in England, it is Watts, the gloomiest of them, who makes a mark on the memory. He has painted noth- ing to amuse us. He has been the executioner of all dreams of joy, of all illu- sions. Looking at him, as looking at the executioner, we think of the last hour, not only of criminals, but of all mankind; of the only inevitable picture of our life, of what we shall be then, and above all, of what we would have been. — FROM THE FRENCH BY H. M. POYNTER [ 36 ] WATTS 37 Cite Works of Ii>atts DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PLATES ‘LOVE AND LIFE’ PLATE I T HE truth which the artist has sought to embody in this picture,” writes Mr. Edward T. Cook, “is that Love — in its widest sense as charity, sympathy, unselfishness — raises human life upward; that humanity in its rugged path is helped by tender aid on the one hand and tender trust on the other. He has purposely kept the picture light and simple; it is rich in atmos- pheric quality, pervaded by an exquisitely pearly opalescent hue. The angel of Love at once supports and leads Life up the rocky paths to the blue hills beyond, his sheltering wings shading the rays of light from beating too fiercely upon the frail form.” It is said that of all Watts’s allegories this was in his eyes the most full of significance, and considered by him his most direct message to the present generation. One version of the subject, now in the Luxembourg Gallery, Paris, he gave to the French nation; another, varying in some slight partic- ulars, was presented by him to the United States, and is now in the White House, Washington; while a third, the one here reproduced, he gave to the National Gallery of British Art (Tate Gallery), London. It measures about seven feet two inches high by nearly four feet wide. ‘LOVE AND DEATH’ PLATE II T HE most famous picture by Watts, and in some respects his masterpiece, is this painting of ‘Love and Death.’ The subject was suggested to the artist while painting the portrait of a young man who, endowed with the best of this world’s gifts, was to the grief of his family and friends slowly dying of a fatal disease; and as at each sitting the painter saw more and more plainly how vain were the efforts of those who loved him to stay the hand of Death, he conceived the idea which many years later lound expression in this picture, which he himself has described as “the progress of the inevitable but not ter- rible Death, who partially but not completely overshadows Love.” Death, a mighty form whose face we cannot see, draped in a robe of ashen gray, presses onward with relentless force to the very door of the house of him whom she has come to claim, unheedful of Love, who meets her on the thresh- old and struggles with all the energy of despair to bar the way. But the climb- ing rose that Love has planted is rudely torn away, its petals are scattered upon the ground, and Love’s brilliant wings are crushed, and his fair form dark- ened by the shadow of Death, who in another second will have passed beyond him into the room. One version of this picture was presented by the artist to the city of Man- chester, England, and another, the one here reproduced, to the English na- tion. This canvas is in the National Gallery of British Art (Tate Gallery), London. It measures about eight feet high by four feet wide. [ 37 ] 38 MASTERS IN ART ‘DIANA AND ENDYMION ’ PLATE III C LASSIC legend,” writes Cosmo Monkhouse, “supplied Watts with the subjects for perhaps his most perfect pictures, but although as a student of the dead rather than a rival of the living he is above all indebted to the Greeks, it is the art of Venice more that than of Athens of which we are re- minded in his lovely vision of ‘ Diana and Endymion.’” With exquisite grace Watts has here portrayed the young Greek shepherd, who, sleeping on Mount Latmos, charmed with his beauty the cold heart of Diana. Robed in diaphanous garments of pale, silvery blue, the goddess of the moon bends down from heaven to kiss Endymion, lulling him into an eter- nal sleep. The idea of the crescent moon has been subtly suggested by the painter in the curve of the hovering figure of Diana and in the cool silvery hues of her drapery and the light gold of her hair. “ For grace of line, classic beauty of form, and charm of mystery,” writes Mr. Spielmann, “Watts has rarely surpassed this work.” The picture is now in a private collection in England. ‘PORTRAIT OF MRS. PERCY WYNDHAM’ PLATE IV A LTHOUGH Watts was, generally speaking, less successful in his repre- k. sentations of women than of men, a notable exception is offered in his portrait of Mrs. Percy Wyndham, which is regarded not only as the finest of his achievements in this special line, but as one of the finest women’s portraits painted in modern times. “ It has,” writes Mr. Quilter, “all the magnificence of action and surrounding of Carolus Duran’s work, with a power of color and a simple dignity to which the French artist could never attain.” Mrs. Percy Wyndham, dressed in a rich green robe cut low in the neck, about which is draped some soft white material, stands against a background of laurel branches. Her hair is dark and her complexion clear and pale. One elbow rests upon a garden balustrade, and at her feet is a large open vase of dull red filled with creamy white magnolia blossoms and brown and green leaves. “With the exception of these flowers and of the flesh-tints,” writes Sir Walter Armstrong, “the general effect is that of a symphony in green. I can,” he adds, “ recall no modern portrait which is so striking in the dignity of pose, freedom of drawing, and rich harmony of color.” The portrait, which is here reproduced by permission of Mrs. Wyndham, is life-sized. When first shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, London, it was pronounced “one of the triumphs of the exhibition.” It is owned by the Hon. Percy Wyndham, Salisbury, England. 1 HOPE ’ PLATE V O NE of the most poetic of Watts’s ideal subjects is this picture of ‘Hope’ seated with her lyre in her hand, blindfold, upon the globe. In the dim twilight her robe of palest green gleams almost white against the evening sky, the coloring and the delicate lines of the drapery investing the figure with a dream-like aspect. Surely never was there a sadder, more pathetic Hope, nor one seemingly more closely akin to Despair! But bending over her lyre to [381 WATTS 39 catch the faint sound of the melody for which she yearns, “she strives” — the words are the painter’s — “to get all the music out of the last remaining string,” while in the sky there shines a single star prophetic of brightness to come. The picture was painted in 1885. Twelve years later it was presented by Watts to the English nation, and is now in the National Gallery of British Art (Tate Gallery), London. It measures about four feet seven inches high by three feet wide. ‘Ganymede’ plate vi A MONG the pictures of children which Watts has painted, none is more ii charming than this representation of the youthful Ganymede, the cup- bearer of Zeus, who was borne from earth to Olympus, the abode of the gods, by an eagle — or, as one version of the story has it, by Zeus himself in the form of an eagle — and there endowed with immortality. Watts has painted him with dark curly hair and large wondering eyes, hold- ing in one hand a bunch of ripe grapes, and in the other a cup. The head of the eagle is seen at the left of the picture, while one wing of the bird extends behind the boy’s naked shoulder. Ganymede’s draperies are deep red, and the whole color-scheme is rich and harmonious. The picture was one of the collection of works in the artist’s possession at Little Holland House. ‘SIR GALAHAD’ PLATE VII l O NE of the most popular pictures by Watts is this representation of Sir Galahad, the knight of King Arthur’s Round Table so spotless in his perfect purity that to his sight was revealed the Holy Grail, that mystic chalice which contained the blood of Christ, and to him alone was success vouchsafed in its quest. In Watts’s painting Sir Galahad has dismounted from his horse and stands in an attitude of devotion, as if already through the forest shades he saw the heavenly vision. The woody background and tangled vegetation, the figure of the knight with his auburn hair and dark armor, and with his snow-white horse beside him, are well rendered; but, as in all the artist’s works, it is the underlying idea which is emphasized rather than any technical merits or de- fects, and in Sir Galahad, the knight “who knew no fear,” Watts has given us an impersonation of youthful fervor, of manly purity, and the inspiration of a great ideal. There are two versions of this picture, one of which, the earlier and less fin- ished, was given by the artist to Eton College, England, where it hangs in the college chapel; the other, which is here reproduced, is owned by Alexander Henderson, Esq., London. ‘PORTRAIT OF CARDINAL MANNING' PLATE V III T HIS portrait is one of the most striking of that great series of represen- tations of distinguished men painted by Watts and presented by him to the English nation. Cardinal Manning is here shown seated in a carved arm- 40 MASTERS IN ART chair, wearing the red cope and biretta, or cap, and the white lace robe of his office. 1 he emaciated face with its lofty brow, delicate features, sunken cheeks, and clear gray eyes — the face of an ascetic — is marked with intel- lectual power. Cardinal Manning was one of the most notable characters of his day, occu- pying for many years a prominent position in the religious, literary, social, and political world of England of the nineteenth century. Born in 1808, he was, after graduating from Oxford, ordained in the English Church, but in 1851 was received into tht Church of Rome. After various promotions he was con- secrated archbishop of Westminster, and, finally, in 1875, created a cardinal. 1 his portrait was painted in 1882, when he was seventy-four years old. It measures about three feet high by two feet three inches wide, and is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. ‘PORTRAIT OF ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON’ PLATE IX O F the many portraits which Watts painted of Tennyson, who was among his closest friends, the one in the possession of Lady Henry Somerset, at Eastnor Park, England, and here reproduced, is regarded as the finest. It was painted in 1859, when the poet was fifty years old and in the full maturity of his powers. Tennyson, as is well known, was a man of powerful build and great phys- ical beauty — “one of the finest looking men in the world,” Carlyle wrote in describing him to Emerson in 1840; “a great shock of dusky hair, bright, laughing hazel eyes, massive aquiline face — most massive yet most delicate.” This portrait of him by Watts, which from a certain dreamy quality it pos- sesses, suggestive of the poetic glamour of moonlight, is known as “the great moonlight portrait,” calls to mind the poet’s own lines in which he embalmed the substance of a reply given by Watts in response to his request that the artist would describe his ideal of what a true portrait-painter should be: “As when a painter, poring on a face. Divinely, through all hindrance, finds the man Behind it, and so paints him that his face. The shape and color of a mind and life. Lives for his children, ever at its best.” ‘ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE’ PLATE X A MONG those paintings suggested to the artist’s mind by classical myths, - this picture of ‘Orpheus and Eurydice,’ which formed part of the collec- tion of works in his gallery at Little Holland House, is one of the most beau- tiful. Watts painted two quite different versions of the subject, of which the one here represented is the earlier; in the other, the figures are full-length, and in the treatment it is more dramatic, but in both versions the moment chosen by the artist is the same — that pathetic moment when Orpheus, Apollo’s son, having descended into the regions of the dead, and by the power of the music of his lyre persuaded Pluto to restore to life his lost Eurydice, sees the beloved [ 40 ] WATTS 41 form sink back into death because he had violated the sole condition upon which his prayer had been granted — that until he had with Eurydice reached once more the upper world he should not turn to look upon her face. A LIST OF THE PRINCIPAL PAINTINGS BY WATTS IN PUBLIC COLLECTIONS A LARGE number of pictures by the late George Frederick Watts belong to the col- lection in the artist’s gallery of his works at Little Holland House, London, and in his studio at Limnerslease, Surrey. A comparatively small number are in private possession. The following list includes only such as have already been placed in public collections, with the addition of the version of ‘Love and Life,’ now in the White House at Washington, D. C., which was presented to the United States by Mr. Watts. E NGLAND. Cambridge, Trinity College: Portrait of Lord Tennyson — Eton College, Chapel: Sir Galahad — Leicester, Town Hall: Fata Morgana — Lon- don, Houses of Parliament, Upper Waiting Hall: St. George and the Dragon (fresco) — London, Lincoln’s Inn, Great Hall: School of Legislature (fresco) — London, National Gallery of British Art: Death Crowning Innocence; Mammon; The Mes- senger; Eve Tempted; ‘She shall be called Woman;’ Eve Repentant; Dray Horses; The Spirit of Christianity; Hope (Plate v); ‘For he had great Possessions;’ Jonah; The Dweller in the Innermost; ‘Sic transit Gloria Mundi;’ The All-Pervading; Love and Life (Plate i); Love Triumphant; Love and Death (Plate n); Time, Death, and Judgment; Chaos; Faith; The Minotaur; Psyche; Life’s Illusions; Portrait of Watts — London, National Por- trait Gallery: Sir Henry Taylor; Sir Anthony Panizzi; Dante Gabriel Rossetti; William Morris; Matthew Arnold; Robert Browning; Lord Tennyson; Cardinal Man- ning (Plate VI 1 1 ) ; John Stuart Mill; Lord Lawrence; Thomas Carlyle; Lord Lytton; Lord Sherbrooke; Lord Lyndhurst; Earl of Shaftsbury; Earl Russell; Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max- Miiller; W. E. Gladstone; Lord Leighton; Dr. Martineau; Lord Stratford de Redclifte; Lord Lyons; Sir Andrew Clark; Sir John Peter Grant; Sir Charles Halle; Duke of Argyll — London, St. Paul’s Cathedral: Time, Death, and Judgment — London, South Kensington Museum: Head of Lorenzo de’ Medici (fresco); Figures and Heads (frescos) — Manchester, Art Gallery: Love and Death; The Good Samaritan — FRANCE. Paris, Luxembourg Gallery: Love and Life — GERMANY. Munich, Neue Pina- kothek: The Happy Warrior — ITALY. Florence, Uffizi Gallery: Portrait of Watts — UNITED STATES. Washington, D. C., The White House: Love and Life. iyatts JatMtograpl))* A LIST OF THE PRINCIPAL BOOKS AND MAGAZINE ARTICLES DEALING WITH WATTS A FULL and complete biography of Watts has yet to be written. Dr. Hugh Mac- millan’s ‘Life-work of George Frederick Watts’ (London, 1903) and a monograph of the artist by Julia Cartwright (London, 1896) are interesting studies, as is also Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s more recent volume ‘G. F. Watts’ (London, 1904). A TKINSON, J. Beavington and OTHERS. English Painters of the Present Day. London, 1871 — Barrington, E. I. Catalogue of Paintings by Watts on Exhibi- tion at the Museum of Art, New York — Bateman, C. T. Watts. London, 1901 — Cartwright, J. Life and Works of George Frederick Watts. London, 1896- — Ches- r 4 1 j 42 MASTERS IN ART neau, E. The English School of Painting: Trans, by L. N. Etherington. London, 1885 — Chesterton, G. K. G. F. Watts. London, 1904 — Cook, E. T. A Handbook to the Tate Gallery. London, 1898 — Forsyth, P. T. Religion in Recent Art. London, 1889 — Hartley, C. G. Pictures in the Tate Gallery. New York, 1905 — La Sizeranne, R. de. English Contemporary Art: Trans, by H. M. Poynter. New York, 1898 — Macmillan, H. The Life-work of George Frederick Watts. London, 1903 — Mac- Coll, D. S. Nineteenth Century Art. Glasgow, 1902 — Monkhouse, C. British Con- temporary Artists. New York, 1899 — Muther, R. History of Modern Painting. New York, 1896 — Quilter, H. Preferences in Art. London, 1892 — Ruskin, J. The Art of England. Orpington, 1884 — Sketchley, R. F. D. Watts. London, 1904. magazine articles A CADEMY, 1882: F. Wedmore; Exhibition of the Work of Watts. 1904: H. Mac- _ fall; G. F. Watts — L’Art, 1882: W. Armstrong; George Frederick Watts — Art Journal, 1884: Anonymous; G. F. Watts. 1904: L. Lusk; G. F. W atts’ Type of Beauty — Athenaeum, 1904: Anonymous; G. F. Watts — Bookman, 1901: G. Chesterton and J. E. Hodder Williams; Literary Portraits of Watts — Brush and Pencil, 1904: G. L. Graham; George Frederick Watts — Burlington Magazine, i 904: Anonymous; George Frederick Watts — Century, 1883: G. W. Prothero; Mr. Watts at the Grosvenor Gal- lery — Contemporary Review, 1882: H. Quilter; The Art of Watts — Cosmopolitan, 1893: G. Campbell; Four Famous Artists — Critic, 1884: K. Cox; A Word for the Watts Collection. 1903: C. Brinton; Watts and Ideal Portraiture — Fortnightly Re- view, 1897: H. H. Statham; Leighton and Watts. 1900: A. Symons; The Art of Waits — Harper’s Magazine, 1885: F. D. Millet; The Watts Exhibition — International Studio, 1903: B. Erskine; Watts’ Portraits at Holland House — L’Italia Moderna, 1904: D. Angeli; G. F. Watts — Kunst unserer Zeit, 1892: H. Zimmern; George Frederick Watts — London Quarterly Review, 1882: Anonymous; Exhibition of Works of G. F. Watts — Magazine of Art, 1878: W. Meynell; Our Living Artists. 1882: C. Monkhouse; The Watts Exhibition. 1897: M. H. Spielmann; George Frederick Watts — Monthly Review, 1904: J. Cartwright; George Frederic Watts — Nation, 1884: W. J. Stillman; The Watts Exhibition. 1884: Anonymous; Two Articles on the Watts Exhibition — Nineteenth Century, 1883: E. I. Barrington; The Painted Poetry of Watts and Rossetti. 1897: M H. Spielmann; Mr. G. F. Watts: His Art and His Mission — North American Review, 1904: R. Cortissoz; George Frederick Watts. — Outlook, 1904: Windsor; Mr. G. F. Watts — Pall Mall Gazette Extra, 1886: M. H. Spielmann; Works of Mr. G. F. Watts — Pall Mall Magazine, i 904: H. Beg- bie; Master Workers — Portfolio, 1887: F. S. Stephens; George Frederick Watts — Review of Reviews, 1902: W. T. Stead; England’s Greatest Living Artist, George Frederick Watts — Saturday Review, 1882: Anonymous; The Watts Exhibition. 1897: D. S. M.; Mr. Watts’ Pictures (in two parts). 1904: D. S. MacColl; G. F. Watts — Scribner’s Magazine, 1894: C. Monkhouse; George Frederick Watts. 1904: C. H. Caffin; George Frederick Watts. 1904: F. Fowler; Watts, a Painter of Portraits — Sewanee Review, 1904: G. B. Rose; George Frederick Watts — Spectator, 1904: Anonymous; George Frederick Watts — Sunday Magazine, 1894: L. T. Meade; The Painter of the Eternal Truths. [ 42 ] MASTERS IN ART fiiLljrfft Cti & 6s 3 i i s S ai C ir S as a, S B9JST9D P\ftSS T HERE is no hotel quite like The Somerset — fas- tidiously appointed with every known requisite for comfort, safety, and enjoyment, delightfully located in Boston’s exclusive residential Back Bay section, accessible to rail- wa y stations, places of amuse- it-s 3 1 ment, shopping centers (ten min- ■ M utes’ ride by electrics), yet free \ Mm from the noise and disagreeable JKm features of city hotel life. You will find and enjoy here the atmosphere W of home surroundings on a magnificent scale, ’ “A dinner at The Somerset” while passing 1 through Boston will be found enjoyable. Our beau- / tiful illustrated booklet mailed free upon request, v \ A L F R ED S . A M E R , M A N A G E R . 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