Watts (1817 1904) written by William Loftus Hare
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WATTS (1817-1904)
by
W. LOFTUS HARE
Illustrated with Eight Reproductions in Colour
[Illustration: PLATE I.--DEATH CROWNING INNOCENCE
(Frontispiece)
A little child lying in the lap of the winged figure of Death.
Death, ever to Watts a silent angel of pity, "takes charge of
Innocence, placing it beyond the reach of evil." It was first
exhibited at the Winter Exhibition of the New Gallery, 1896,
and was given to the nation in 1897. It is now at the Tate
Gallery.]
MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR
EDITED BY T. LEMAN HARE
"MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR" SERIES
ARTIST. AUTHOR.
VELAZQUEZ. S.L. BENSUSAN.
REYNOLDS. S.L. BENSUSAN.
TURNER. C. LEWIS HIND.
ROMNEY. C. LEWIS HIND.
GREUZE. ALYS EYRE MACKLIN.
BOTTICELLI. HENRY B. BINNS.
ROSSETTI. LUCIEN PISSARRO.
BELLINI. GEORGE HAY.
FRA ANGELICO. JAMES MASON.
REMBRANDT. JOSEF ISRAELS.
LEIGHTON. A. LYS BALDRY.
RAPHAEL. PAUL G. KONODY.
HOLMAN HUNT. MARY E. COLERIDGE.
TITIAN. S.L. BENSUSAN.
MILLAIS. A. LYS BALDRY.
CARLO DOLCI. GEORGE HAY.
GAINSBOROUGH. MAX ROTHSCHILD.
TINTORETTO. S.L. BENSUSAN.
LUINI. JAMES MASON.
FRANZ HALS. EDGCUMBE STALEY.
VAN DYCK. PERCY M. TURNER.
LEONARDO DA VINCI. M.W. BROCKWELL.
RUBENS. S.L. BENSUSAN.
WHISTLER. T. MARTIN WOOD.
HOLBEIN. S.L. BENSUSAN.
BURNE-JONES. A. LYS BALDRY.
VIGEE LE BRUN. C. HALDANE MACFALL.
CHARDIN. PAUL G. KONODY.
FRAGONARD. C. HALDANE MACFALL.
MEMLINC. W.H.J. & J.C. WEALE.
CONSTABLE. C. LEWIS HIND.
RAEBURN. JAMES L. CAW.
JOHN S. SARGENT. T. MARTIN WOOD.
LAWRENCE. S.L. BENSUSAN.
DUERER. H.E.A. FURST.
MILLET. PERCY M. TURNER.
WATTEAU. C. LEWIS HIND.
HOGARTH. C. LEWIS HIND.
MURILLO. S.L. BENSUSAN.
WATTS. W. LOFTUS HARE.
INGRES. A.J. FINBERG.
Others in Preparation.
The Publishers have to acknowledge the permission of Mrs.
Watts to reproduce the series of paintings here included.
[Illustration: IN SEMPITERNUM.]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Plate
I. Death crowning Innocence Frontispiece
At the Tate Gallery
II. The Minotaur
At the Tate Gallery
III. Hope
At the Tate Gallery
IV. Thomas Carlyle
At the South Kensington Museum
V. Love and Life
At the Tate Gallery
VI. Love Triumphant
At the Tate Gallery
VII. The Good Samaritan
At the Manchester Art Gallery
VIII. Prayer
At the Manchester Art Gallery
[Illustration]
I
A BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE
In July of 1904 the eighty-seven mortal years of George Frederick Watts
came to an end. He had outlived all the contemporaries and acquaintances
of his youth; few, even among the now living, knew him in his middle
age; while to those of the present generation, who knew little of the
man though much of his work, he appeared as members of the Ionides
family, thus inaugurating the series of private and public portraits for
which he became so famous. The Watts of our day, however, the teacher
first and the painter afterwards, had not yet come on the scene. His
first aspiration towards monumental painting began in the year 1843,
when in a competition for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament he
gained a prize of L300 for his cartoon of "Caractacus led Captive
through the Streets of Rome." At this time, when history was claiming
pictorial art as her servant and expositor, young Watts carried off the
prize against the whole of his competitors. This company included the
well-known historical painter Haydon, who, from a sense of the
impossibility of battling against his financial difficulties, and from
the neglect, real or fancied, of the leading politicians, destroyed
himself by his own hand.
The L300 took the successful competitor to Italy, where for four years
he remained as a guest of Lord Holland. Glimpses of the Italy he gazed
upon and loved are preserved for us in a landscape of the hillside town
of Fiesole with blue sky and clouds, another of a castellated villa
and mountains near Florence, and a third of the "Carrara Mountains
near Pisa"; while of his portraiture of that day, "Lady Holland" and
"Lady Dorothy Nevill" are relics of the Italian visit.
[Illustration: PLATE II.--THE MINOTAUR
In this terrible figure, half man, half bull, gazing over the
sea from the battlement of a hill tower, we see the artist's
representation of the greed and lust associated with modern
civilisations. The picture was exhibited at the Winter
Exhibition of the New Gallery, 1896, and formed part of the
Watts Gift in 1897. It hangs in the Watts Room at the Tate
Gallery.]
Italy, and particularly Florence, was perpetual fascination and
inspiration to Watts. There he imbibed the influences of Orcagna and
Titian--influences, indeed, which were clearly represented in the next
monumental painting which he attempted. It came about that Lord Holland
persuaded his guest to enter a fresh competition for the decoration of
the Parliament Houses, and Watts carried off the prize with his "Alfred
inciting the Saxons to resist the landing of the Danes." The colour and
movement of the great Italian masters, conspicuously absent from the
"Caractacus" cartoon, were to be seen in this new effort, where, as has
been said, the English king stands like a Raphaelesque archangel in the
midst of the design.
In 1848 Watts had attained, one might almost say, the position of
official historical painter to the State, a post coveted by the
unfortunate Haydon; and he received a commission to paint a fresco of
"St. George overcomes the Dragon," which was not completed till 1853.
In this year he contributed as an appendix to the Diary of Haydon--in
itself an exciting document, showing how wretched the life of an
official painter then might be--a note telling of the state of
historical and monumental painting in the 'forties, and of his own
attitude towards it; a few of his own words, written before the days of
the "poster," may be usefully quoted here:
ON THE PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT OF ARTISTS
Patriots and statesmen alike forget that the time will come
when the want of great art in England will produce a gap sadly
defacing the beauty of the whole national structure....
Working, for example, as an historian to record England's
battles, Haydon would, no doubt, have produced a series of
mighty and instructive pictures....
Why should not the Government of a mighty country undertake
the decoration of all the public buildings, such as Town
Halls, National Schools, and even Railway Stations....
... Or considering the walls as slates whereon the school-boy
writes his figures, the great productions of other times might
be reproduced, if but to be rubbed out when fine originals
could be procured; for the expense would very little exceed
that of whitewashing....
If, for example, on some convenient wall the whole line of
British sovereigns were painted--were monumental effigies
well and correctly drawn, with date, length of reign,
remarkable events written underneath, these worthy objects
would be attained--intellectual exercise, decoration of space,
and instruction to the public.
The year 1848 was a critical time for Watts; his first allegorical
picture, "Time and Oblivion," was painted, and, in the year following,
"Life's Illusions" appeared on the walls of the famous Academy which
contained the first works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Watts was
not of the party, though he might have been had he desired; he preferred
independence.
Watts' personal life was at this time pervaded by the influence of Lord
and Lady Holland, who, having returned from Florence to London, had him
as a constant visitor to Holland House. In 1850 he went to live at The
Dower House, an old building in the fields of Kensington. There, as a
guest of the Prinsep family, he set up as a portrait painter. His host
and family connections were some of the first to sit for him; and he
soon gained fame in this class of work.
There was a temporary interruption in 1856, when a journey to the East,
in company with Sir Charles Newton, for the purpose of opening the
buried Temple of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, gave Watts further insight
into the old Greek world; and, one cannot but think, stimulated his
efforts, later so successful, in depicting for us so many incidents in
classical lore. We have, in a view of a mountainous coast called "Asia
Minor," and another, "The Isle of Cos," two charming pictorial records
of this important expedition. The next six years of the artist's life
were spent as a portrait painter; not, indeed, if one may say so, as a
professional who would paint any one's portrait, but as a friend, who
loved to devote himself to his friends.
In pursuance of his principles touching monumental work, Watts engaged
himself over a period of five years on the greatest and the last of his
civic paintings--namely, the "Justice; a Hemicycle of Lawgivers," to
which I shall later refer.
Watts was a man who seems to have enjoyed in a singular degree the great
privilege of friendship, which while it has its side of attachment, has
also its side of detachment. Even in his youthful days he never "settled
down," but was a visitor and guest rather than an attached scholar and
student at the schools and studies. It is told of him that when just
about to leave Florence, after a short visit, he casually presented a
letter of introduction to Lord Holland, which immediately led to a four
years' stay there, and this friendship lasted for many years after the
ambassador's return to England. Other groups of friends, represented by
the Ionides, the Prinseps, the Seniors, and the Russell Barringtons,
seemed to have possessed him as their special treasure, in whose
friendship he passed a great part of his life. Two great men, the
titular chiefs of poetry and painting, were much impressed by him, and
drew from him great admiration--Tennyson and Leighton; from the latter
he learned much; in the sphere of music, of which Watts was passionately
fond, there stands out Joachim the violinist.
Watts used to recall, as the happiest time in his life, his youthful
days as a choral singer; and he always regretted that he had not become
a musician. Besides being fond of singing he declared that he constantly
heard (or felt) mystic music--symphonies, songs, and chorales. Only
once did he receive a _vision_ of a picture--idea, composition and
colours--that was "Time, Death, and Judgment." Music, after all, is
nearer to the soul of the intuitive man than any of the arts, and Watts
felt this deeply. He also had considerable dramatic talent.
In 1864 some friends found for Watts a bride in the person of Miss Ellen
Terry. The painter and the youthful actress were married in Kensington
in February of that year, and Watts took over Little Holland House. The
marriage, however, was irksome, both to the middle-aged painter and the
vivacious child of sixteen, whose words, taken from her autobiography,
are the best comment we possess on this incident:
"Many inaccurate stories have been told of my brief married
life, and I have never contradicted them--they were so
manifestly absurd. Those who can imagine the surroundings into
which I, a raw girl, undeveloped in all except my training as
an actress, was thrown, can imagine the situation.... I
wondered at the new life and worshipped it because of its
beauty. When it suddenly came to an end I was thunderstruck;
and refused at first to consent to the separation which was
arranged for me in much the same way as my marriage had
been.... There were no vulgar accusations on either side, and
the words I read in the deed of separation, 'incompatibility
of temper,' more than covered the ground. Truer still would
have been 'incompatibility of _occupation_,' and the
interference of well-meaning friends.
"'The marriage was not a happy one,' they will probably say
after my death, and I forestall them by saying that it was in
many ways very happy indeed. What bitterness there was effaced
itself in a very remarkable way." (_The Story of My Life_,
1908.)
In 1867, at the age of fifty, without his application or knowledge,
Watts was made an Associate, and in the following year a full Member, of
the Royal Academy. Younger men had preceded him in this honour, but
doubtless Watts' modesty and independence secured for him a certain
amount of official neglect. The old studio in Melbury Road, Kensington,
was pulled down in 1868, and a new house was built suited to the painter
who had chosen for himself a hermit life. The house was built in such a
way as would avoid the possibility of entertaining guests, and was
entirely dedicated to work. Watts continued his series of official
portraits, and many of the most beautiful mythical paintings followed
this change. Five years later, Watts was found at Freshwater in the Isle
of Wight, and in 1876 he secured what he had so long needed, the
sympathetic help and co-operation in his personal and artistic aims, in
Mr. and Mrs. Russell Barrington, his neighbours.
In 1877 Watts decided, in conformity with his views on patriotic art, to
give his pictures to the nation, and there followed shortly after, in
1881 and 1882, exhibitions of his works in Whitechapel and the Grosvenor
Gallery. A leaflet entitled "What should a picture say?" issued with the
approval of Watts, in connection with the Whitechapel Exhibition, has a
characteristic answer to the question put to him.
"Roughly speaking, a picture must be regarded in the same
light as written words. It must speak to the beholder and tell
him something.... If a picture is a representation only, then
regard it from that point of view only. If it treats of a
historical event, consider whether it fairly tells its tale.
Then there is another class of picture, that whose purpose is
to convey suggestion and idea. You are not to look at that
picture as an actual representation of facts, for it comes
under the same category of dream visions, aspirations, and we
have nothing very distinct except the sentiment. If the
painting is bad--the writing, the language of art, it is a
pity. The picture is then not so good as it should be, but the
thought is there, and the thought is what the artist wanted to
express, and it is or should be impressed on the spectator."
In 1886 his pictures were exhibited in New York, where they created a
great sensation; but incidents connected with the exhibition, and
criticisms upon it, caused the artist much nervous distress.
[Illustration: PLATE III.--HOPE
(At the Tate Gallery)
At the first glance it is rather strange that such a picture
should bear such a title, but the imagery is perfectly true.
The heavens are illuminated by a solitary star, and Hope bends
her ear to catch the music from the last remaining string of
her almost shattered lyre. The picture was painted in 1885 and
given to the nation in 1897. A very fine duplicate is in the
possession of Mrs. Rushton.]
It was a peculiar difficulty of his nature which led him to insist, on
the occasions of the London and provincial exhibitions of his pictures,
that the borrowers were to make all arrangements with his frame-maker,
that he should not be called upon to act in any way, and that no
personal reference should be introduced. Watts always considered himself
a private person; he disliked public functions and fled from them if
there were any attempt to draw attention to him. His habits of work were
consistent with these unusual traits. At sunrise he was at his easel.
During the hot months of summer he was hard at work in his London
studio, leaving for the country only for a few weeks during foggy
weather.
At the age of sixty-nine Watts married Miss Mary Fraser-Tytler, with
whom he journeyed to Egypt, painting there a study of the "Sphinx," one
of the cleverest of his landscapes. Three years after his return, he
settled at Limnerslease, Compton, in Surrey, where he took great
interest in the attempt to revive industrial art among the rural
population.
Twice, in 1885 and 1894, the artist refused, for private reasons, the
baronetcy that other artists had accepted. He lived henceforth and died
the untitled patriot and artist, George Frederick Watts.
II
THE MAN AND THE MESSENGER
Having given in the preceding pages the briefest possible outline of the
life of Watts as a man amongst men, we are now able to come to closer
quarters. He was essentially a messenger--a teacher, delivering to the
world, in such a manner that his genius and temperament made possible,
ideas which had found their place in his mind. He would have been the
first to admit that without these ideas he would be less than nothing.
If it were possible to bring together all the external acts of the
painter's life, his journeyings to and fro, his making and his losing
friends, we should have insufficient data to enable us to understand
Watts' message; his great ambitions, his constant failures, his intimate
experiences, his reflections and determinations--known to none but
himself--surely these, the internal life of Watts, are the real sources
of his message? True, he was in the midst of the nineteenth century,
breathing its atmosphere, familiar with the ideals of its great men,
doubting, questioning, and hoping with the rest. To him, as to many a
contemporary stoic, the world was in a certain sense an alien ground,
and mortal life was to be stoically endured and made the best of. It is
impossible to believe, however, that this inspiring and prophetic
painter reproduced and handed on merely that which his time and society
gave him. His day and his associates truly gave him much; the past and
his heredity made their contributions; but we must believe that the
purest gold was fired in the crucible of his inner experience, his joys
and his sufferings. In him was accomplished that great discovery which
the philosophers have called Pessimism; he not only saw in other men (as
depicted in his memorable canvas of 1849), but he experienced in himself
the transitory life's illusions. To Watts, the serious man of fifty
years, Love and Death, Faith and Hope, Aspiration, Suffering, and
Remorse, were not, as to the eighteenth-century rhymester, merely Greek
ladies draped in flowing raiment; to him they were realities, intensely
focussed in himself. Watts was giving of himself, of his knowledge and
observation of what Love is and does, and how Death appears so
variously; and who but a man who knew the melancholy of despair could
paint that picture "Hope"?
Immediately after the central crisis of his personal life appeared the
canvas entitled "Fata Morgana," illustrative of a knight in vain pursuit
of a phantom maiden; and before long there was from his brush the
pictured story of a lost love, "Orpheus and Eurydice," one of the
saddest of all myths, but, one feels, no old myth to him.
By a more careful analysis of the artist's work we hope to learn the
teaching Watts set himself to give, and to ascertain the means that he
adopted; but one point needs to be made clear at this stage, namely,
that although Watts was a great teacher, yet he was not a revolutionary.
The ideals he held up were not new or strange, but old, well-tried, one
might almost say conventional. They represent the ideals which, in the
friction and turmoil of ages, have emerged as definite, clear, final.
They are not disputed or dubious notions, but accepted truisms forgotten
and neglected, waiting for the day when men shall live by them.
Furthermore, Watts was not in any sense a mystic--neither personally or
as an artist. "The Dweller in the Innermost" is not the transcendental
self known to a few rare souls, but is merely conscience, known to all.
The biblical paintings have no secret meaning assigned to them. The
inhabitants of Eden, the hero of the Deluge, the Hebrew patriarchs,
Samson and Satan--all these are the familiar figures of the
evangelical's Bible. "Eve Repentant" is the woman Eve, the mother of the
race; "Jacob and Esau" are the brothers come to reconciliation; "Jonah"
is the prophet denouncing the Nineveh of his day and the Babylon of
this. The teaching--and there is teaching in every one of them--is plain
and ethical. So also, with the Greek myths; they teach plainly--they
hold no esoteric interpretations. Watts is no Neo-Platonist weaving
mystical doctrines from the ancient hero tales; he is rather a stoic, a
moralist, a teacher of earthly things.
But we must be careful to guard against the impression of Watts as a
lofty philosopher consciously issuing proclamations by means of his art.
Really he was not aware of being a philosopher at all; he was simply an
artist, an exquisitely delicate and sensitive medium, who, when once
before his canvas, suddenly filled with his idea, was compelled to say
his word. If there be any synthesis about his finished work--and no one
can deny this--it was not because Watts gave days and nights and years
to "thinking things out." His paintings are, as he used to call them,
"anthems," brought forth by the intuitive man, the musician. This was
the fundamental Watts. Whatever unity there be, is due rather to unity
of inspiration than to strength or definiteness of character and
accomplishment, and this was sometimes referred to by Watts as a golden
thread passing through his life--a thread of good intention--which he
felt would guide him through the labyrinth of distractions, mistakes,
irritations, ill health, and failures.
One of the striking incidents in the life of Watts was his offer to
decorate Euston Railway Station with frescoes entitled "The Progress of
Cosmos." "Chaos" we have in the Tate Gallery, full of suggestiveness and
interest. We see a deep blue sky above the distant mountains, gloriously
calm and everlasting; in the middle distance to the left is a nebulous
haze of light, while in the foreground the rocks are bursting open and
the flames rush through. Figures of men, possessed by the energy and
agony of creation, are seen wrestling with the elements of fire and
earth. One of these figures, having done his work, floats away from the
glow of the fire across the transparent water, while others of his
creative family have quite passed the struggling stage of movement and
are reclining permanent and gigantic to the right of the picture. The
same idea is repeated in the chain of draped women who are emerging from
the watery deep; at first they are swept along in isolation, then they
fly in closer company, next they dance and finally walk in orderly
procession. But Chaos, for all this, is a unity; of all material forms
it is the most ancient form; Cosmos however is the long-drawn tale
beginning with the day when "The Spirit of God brooded on the face of
the waters." Cosmos might have been Watts' synthetic pictorial
philosophy; Herbert Spencer with his pen, and he with his brush, as it
were, should labour side by side. But this was not to be; the Directors
of the North-Western Railway declined the artist's generous offer, and
he had to get his "Cosmos" painted by degrees. On the whole, perhaps, we
should be thankful that the railway company liberated Watts from this
self-imposed task. We remember that Dante in his exile set out to write
"Il Convivio," a Banquet of so many courses that one might tremble at
the prospect of sitting down to it; the four treatises we have are
interesting, though dry as dust; but if Dante had finished his Banquet,
he might never have had time for his "Divine Comedy"; so perhaps, after
all, we shall be well content to be without Watts' "Cosmos," remembering
what we have gained thereby. Besides, the continuous and spontaneous
self-revelation of an artist or a poet is sometimes truer than a rigid
predetermined plan.
[Illustration: PLATE IV.--THOMAS CARLYLE
(At the South Kensington Museum)
This canvas was painted in 1868, and is the earlier of the two
portraits of the famous historian painted by Watts. It formed
part of the Foster Bequest. It is interesting to compare this
with the painting in the National Portrait Gallery.]
A few words from the pen of the artist, appearing by way of preface to a
book, "A Plain Handicraft," may here be quoted to indicate the strong
views Watts took on the "Condition-of-England Question." His interest in
art was not centred in painting, or sculpture, or himself, or his fellow
artists. He believed in the sacred mission of art as applied to profane
things. We see how closely he adheres to the point of view made so
famous by Ruskin. Both Watts and Ruskin, one feels, belong rather to the
days of Pericles, when everything was best in the state because the
citizens gave themselves up to it and to each other. Writing of the
necessity and utility of reviving Plain Handicrafts among the mass of
the people, the painter of "Mammon" says: