# Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Watts, George Frederic

​WATTS, GEORGE FREDERIC (1817–1904), painter and sculptor, was the eldest child of the second marriage of George Watts, a musical-instrument maker (born 1774), who came to London from Hereford about 1800. Some Welsh names in the family of George Watts's mother indicate that he may have been partly of Welsh descent. (This is the only ground for the statement often confidently made that the artist was a ‘Celt.’). By his first marriage George Watts had a son and two daughters, who were nearly grown up when in 1816 he took for second wife a widow whose maiden name had been Harriet Smith. Their son, George Frederic, was born in Queen Street, Bryanston Square, on 23 Feb. 1817. Three more sons followed, who all died in infancy or early childhood. George Watts, besides being a piano maker and tuner, was much occupied with unsuccessful schemes for the invention and manufacture of new musical instruments. The second Mrs. Watts fell into a consumption and died in 1826. The boy George Frederic grew up as the ailing and cherished son of a refined, ineffectual father in straitened circumstances, his two half-sisters by the first marriage managing the household as best they might. He suffered much from giddiness and sick headache, and had no regular schooling, but devoured the books, few but good, that were in the house, especially the ‘Iliad’ and Scott's novels. He learned his Bible, and despite painful recollections of the gloom and depression of puritan Sundays, loved it in after life, not indeed as revelation, but as the highest ethical and traditional poetry and symbolism. From childhood he was devoted to drawing, and there are still extant minutely accurate copies of engravings made by him with a chalk point in his twelfth year. His father, who had some taste in art, encouraged this bent. The opportunity, not for regular teaching but for study of a kind perhaps more fruitful, came to him through acquaintance with the family of Behnes. The elder Behnes was a piano-maker from Hanover with whom George Watts was in some way associated. In the same house with him lived a French émigré practising as a sculptor, and this man's example moved two of Behnes's sons, Henry and William, to follow the profession of art. William and a crippled third brother, Charles, occupied first a studio in Dean Street, Soho, and afterwards one in Osnaburgh Street. Of these studios Watts in boyhood had the run, and learned all that could be learned there. William Behnes was a fine draughtsman and something of a painter as well as a sculptor; he taught the boy early to feel and understand the supreme qualities of the Parthenon marbles. A friend of Charles, a miniature painter, gave young Watts his first chance and first lesson in oil-painting by setting him to make a copy from Lely and prescribing the colours to be used. Soon we hear of the lad taking in William Behnes with a sham Vandyck which, for a jest, he had himself painted and smoked to make it look old. George Watts showed some of his son's drawings to Sir Martin Archer Shee, ​whose verdict was not encouraging. The boy got more favourable notice from Haydon, who stopped him one day as he was carrying a bundle of drawings in the street. He drew continually, both copies and originals, and by the time he was sixteen had begun to earn a livelihood by small commissions for portraits in pencil or chalks at five shillings each. At eighteen he entered the Royal Academy schools, where he found the teaching slack and unhelpful. From Hilton, the keeper, he received praise and encouragement, but failed to win the medal which Hilton thought he deserved. In his twentieth year (1837) he had a studio of his own in Clipstone Street, and painted the fine study of a wounded heron, now in the memorial gallery at Limnerslease, from a bird he had bought in a poulterer's shop. At the Royal Academy he exhibited this picture and two portraits of ladies. Portraits of himself and of his father done in these years show already a frank and skilful handling of the oil medium.
By this time young Watts had made the acquaintance of Nicolas Wanostrocht [q. v.], an Englishman of Belgian extraction, who kept a successful school inherited from his father at Blackheath, and who was at the same time a professional cricketer and writer on cricket under the name of Nicholas Felix. At the Blackheath school Watts spent many of his evenings, studying music, French, Italian, and to some extent Greek, and acquiring from his new friend both a fresh zest for life and a wider range of reading. As a commission from him Watts drew and lithographed seven positions in the game of cricket, several of the figures being portraits of the famous cricketers of the day. These lithographs are now rare: five of the original drawings are preserved in the Marylebone cricket club. Life was however still a struggle to the young man. The failure of his father's undertakings weighed upon him, and he was subject to alternate moods of confident hope and acute physical and mental depression. In his twenty-first or twenty-second year he had the good fortune to be introduced to Mr. Constantine Ionides, a member of a leading family in the Greek colony in London and father of the well-known art collector of the same name. Mr. Ionides ordered from young Watts a copy of a portrait of his father by Lane, preferred the copy to the original when it was done, and gave him a commission for a family group. The connection was renewed later, and as many as twenty portraits of various members of the Ionides family, dating from almost all periods of his working life, are extant. Distinguished persons from other circles soon began to figure among his sitters, including members of the Noel and of the Spring Rice families. He had a commission to paint a portrait of Roebuck, and one of Jeremy Bentham from the wax effigy which the philosopher had ordered to be constructed over his bones. But in his own mind he from the first regarded portraiture as an inferior branch of art, and set his whole soul's ambition on imaginative and creative design.
In April 1842 was issued the official notice inviting cartoons in competition for a design from English history, Spenser, Shakespeare, or Milton, in commemoration of the rebuilding of Westminster Palace, just completed. Watts went ardently to work, and sent in, with no expectation of success, a cartoon of Caractacus led in triumph through Rome. To his extreme surprise he won one of the three premiums (300l.), the other winners being Edward Armitage [q. v. Suppl. I] and C. W. Cope [q. V. Suppl. I]. The cartoons were acquired by a speculator and sent on exhibition round the country; that by Watts fell into the hands of a dealer who cut it up; such fragments as have survived are now preserved in the collection of Lord Northbourne at Betteshanger Park. With the sum thus earned Watts determined to start on a journey to Italy. He travelled by diligence, then by water down the Saone and Rhone, and by steamboat from Marseilles to Leghorn, making good friends by the way: and so by Pisa to Florence, where he had promised himself a stay of two months. Absorbed in the enthusiasm of study, he had almost reached the end of his time when he was reminded of an introduction he had brought but neglected to deliver to Lord Holland, then British minister at the court of Tuscany. He called and was welcomed. The rare natural dignity, simplicity, and charm of presence and person which at all times distinguished him won him the warm regard and affection both of Lord and Lady Holland almost from his first visit. They invited him to stay with them for a few days in the house tenanted by the legation, the Casa Feroni (now Palazzo Amerighi) in the Via dei Serragli, Borgo San Frediano. In the result he lived as their guest for the next four years, partly at the Casa Feroni, partly at the old Medicean villa of Careggi without the walls. Studios ​in both houses — at the Villa Careggi a vast one — were arranged for him. Nothing was more characteristic of the man than his quietly ascetic way of living in the midst of luxury and the unshaken industry which never let itself be seduced by social attention or flattery. He worked hard during these Florence years, always with high ambitions though always with a modest estimate of himself. He began with portraits of Lord and Lady Holland, of which the former was afterwards nearly destroyed by fire. He also painted the grand duke of Lucca, Countess Walewska, and Princess Mathilde Bonaparte. In the evenings he drew pencil portraits of many interesting guests and friends. He decorated the courtyard of the Casa Feroni with frescoes, which have since disappeared under whitewash. At the Villa Careggi there is still preserved a fresco painted by him of the scene following the death of Lorenzo de' Medici. In the great studio at the villa he designed and began to execute many vast canvases inspired by Italian literature and legend. Among these was the subject from Boc- caccio's tale of 'Anastasio degl' Onesti,' afterwards carried out on a huge scale in his studio in Charles Street; Dante's 'Paolo and Francesca,' in its final form perhaps the noblest extant rendering of the theme in painting; the Fata Morgana from Boiardo; and the scene of Buondel- monti riding under the portico on the day that saw the beginning of the great feud. He practised modelling also, and an alabaster Medusa of the time is still pre- served. He paid visits with Lord and Lady Holland to their villa at Naples and to Rome, where he learned to prize the Sistine ceiling of Michelangelo as the highest achievement of human art after the marbles of the Parthenon. After 1845 the Hollands (no longer at the legation) lived much at Naples, Watts staying on by himself at Careggi, and receiving sym- pathetic attentions, such as at all times he needed and attracted, from Lady Duff Gordon and her two daughters, Georgiana and Alice, who remained his staunch friends to the end. In 1847 the Westminster Palace commissioners invited a new competition for an historical painting, and Watts began to prepare with immense pains preliminary studies for a great design of Alfred urging his countrymen to fight the Danes by sea.
In April of this year he sailed from Leghorn to London, and brought with him several huge canvases, intending to finish them in England and then return to Italy. But destiny decided otherwise, and the remainder of his life, except for an occasional trip abroad of a few weeks or months, was spent in England. The princely amateur Mr. R. S. Holford, whose acquaintance he had made shortly before leaving Careggi, offered him a vacant room in Dorchester House as a temporary studio. While working here he lodged at 48 Cambridge Street. In the Westminster Hall compe- tition he won one of the three fixst premiums of 500l., [[Pickersgill, Frederick Richard (DNB01)|Frederick Richard Pickersgill [q. v. Suppl. I] and Edward Armitage [q. v. Suppl. I] carrying off the others. The commissioners desiring to purchase Watts's work, he offered it for the nominal price of 200l., and it was placed in one of the committee rooms of the House of Commons. At Dorchester House Watts painted 'Life's Illusions' and 'Time and Oblivion,' the two of his allegorical designs with which to the end he remained least dissatisfied- John Ruskin, with whom Watts had made friends after his return from Italy, for a while had 'Time and Oblivion' in his house, but presently found in it not enough minute imitation of natural detail. He afterwards bought a picture by Watts of 'Saint Michael contending with Satan for the body of Moses.' For the Duff Gordon ladies Watts at this time painted a portrait of Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford, for whose gifts of mind and person and powers as an amateur artist he conceived the strongest admiration. Lord and Lady Holland having by this time (1847-8) come back to England, Watts resumed his intimacy with them, and painted decorations on some of the ceilings at Holland House, as weU as a new full-length portrait of the lady. About the same time he painted portraits of Guizot and Panizzi. Pencil designs of nearly the same date were 'The Temptation of Eve' and 'Satan calling up his Legions.' Meanwhile he was cherishing a great dream, which has been aptly called 'the ambition of half his life and the regret of the other half.' This was for a vast comprehensive sequence of emblematic and decorative paintings illustrating the cosmic evolution of the world and of human civilisation. 'The House of Life' was the name which, looking back on the scheme in retrospect, he would have given it. But much as his enthusiastic projects for monumental works of painting impressed the circle of his immediate friends, they left cold the public powers who dispose of funds and wall-spaces, and scope and opportunity for their realisation were seldom granted him. Of this particular scheme only a few ​detached episodes were destined later to come into being, painted as separate pictures and on a different scale from his first conception. London life, the London climate, and the difficulty of even earning a livelihood by the kind of work he longed to do, depressed his never robust health. He planned a travel in Greece with Mr. Ionides in 1848, but gave it up in consequence of the disturbed state of Europe. By this time he had moved to a large studio at 30 Charles Street, Berkeley Square. Here he became a member of the distinguished circle, including Robert Morier, Chichester Fortescue, James Spedding, John Ruskin, Henry Layard, and William Harcourt, which met twice a week for evening conversation at Morier's rooms, 49 New Bond Street, and formed the nucleus of the Cosmopolitan Club. When in September 1853 Morier went abroad, and about the same time Watts gave up the Charles Street studio, the club established itself there, and with one short interruption held its meetings in the same place, with the great Boccaccio picture still hanging on the walls, until 1902, when the house was vacated and the picture removed to the great hall at the Tate Gallery.
A new friend of Watts about 1850–1 was the poet Aubrey de Vere [q. v. Suppl. II], a cousin of his early friends the Spring Rices and brother of Sir Vere de Vere, to whom the painter about this date paid a visit at Curragh Chase. He had always been interested in Ireland, and had previously painted from imagination a picture of an Irish eviction. Flying visits of this nature often proved tonic for his health, which in all these years was very frail. It was about this time that he conceived the scheme of a series of portraits of the distinguished men of his time to be ultimately presented to the nation, and began with Lord John Russell. Additions were made to the series at intervals until almost the year of his death, and the greater part of them have now found their home in the National Portrait Gallery. About the same time he was induced to admit a young gentleman from Yorkshire, Roddam Spencer Stanhope, to work in his studio; but he did not believe in the direct teaching of art to a pupil by a master, only in the exercise of a general stimulus and example. A fresh acquaintance which in 1850 had a decisive influence on his life was that with Miss Virginia Pattle, soon afterwards to become Lady Somers, the most beautiful and fascinating of the seven remarkable daughters of James Pattle, of the East India Company's service. She was then living with her brother-in-law and sister, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Thoby Prinsep [q. v.]. The whole family became his devoted and admiring friends; their features are commemorated in very many paintings and drawings by his hand. The Prinseps were looking for a new home, and Watts found them one in Little Holland House, Kensington, a rather romantic, rambling combination of two old houses in a spacious garden, and with much of a country aspect, in the south-west corner of Holland Park. In this home they invited Watts to join them, and he was domesticated there for the next five-and-twenty years; retaining also for the first year or two the studio in Charles Street. In this circle he first received the name ‘Signor,’ by which his nearer friends always afterwards spoke of and to him, as something less formal than a surname and less familiar than a Christian name. Meantime he was low in health and spirits; and the mood found its expression in pictures such as ‘Found Drowned,’ ‘Under a Dry Arch,’ ‘The Seamstress.’ In 1850 he exhibited a picture of ‘The Good Samaritan.’ Through his friend Lord Elcho he asked for leave to decorate the great hall of Euston Station with monumental paintings, if the company would pay for scaffolding and colours. The offer was declined. He accepted, under protest as to the conditions, an official commission, consequent on his success in the 1847 competition, to paint one of a series of twelve wall-paintings by different hands in a cramped corridor of Westminster Palace, and chose for his subject the ‘Triumph of the Red Cross Knight’ from Spenser. These paintings are now dilapidated and covered up. In 1853 he went for a month's trip to Venice with R. S. Stanhope, and, making his first intimate acquaintance with Venetian art, thought he found in the work of Titian and his contemporaries a pictorial expression of exactly those qualities in flesh and drapery the rendering of which in marble had from the first appealed to him above all things in the sculptures of the Parthenon. His life-long technical preoccupation was the attainment of something like these same Phidiac and Titianic qualities in his own work. In the same year he obtained the best chance of his life for a large decorative work of the kind he loved. For the north wall of the newly finished hall of Lincoln's Inn he offered to paint in fresco a great subject which ​which he called ‘Justice—a Hemicycle of Lawgivers.’ The offer was accepted. The work, which could only be done during law vacations, took him six years to finish, after many delays due to weak health and absences abroad. Paralysing attacks of nervous headache and prostration continued to be frequent. It may be doubted if the physical atmosphere of Little Holland House was good for him. But its social atmosphere—largely of his own creation—was entirely congenial. He lived the life of a recluse so far as concerned outside society, and never broke his ascetic habits of early rising and day-long industry. But everything that was gifted, amiable, or admirable in the life of Victorian England seemed naturally drawn towards him, and came to seek him in the Kensington studio and garden. His chief time for receiving friends and visitors other than sitters (and these included practically all the distinguished men and beautiful women of his day) was on Sunday afternoons and evenings. A new and inspiring friend and sitter at this time was Mrs. Nassau Senior, of whom he painted one of his best portraits, exhibiting it by way of experiment under a pseudonym. He spent some months of the winter 1855–6 in Paris, where he had sittings from Thiers, Prince Jerome Buonaparte, and Princess Lieven among others. About this time he also undertook fresco work for Lord Somers at 7 Carlton House Terrace.
In 1856–7 Watts ventured upon a more extended travel than usual. His old friend (Sir) Charles Newton [q. v. Suppl. I], the archæologist, had for some years been British consul at Mitylene and had often pressed him to go out there for a visit. Now at length, in the autumn of 1856, when the Crimean war was over and Lord Stratford de Redcliffe had obtained the firmans enabling Newton to begin his long-desired task of excavation at Budrum, the site of the ancient Halicarnassus, Watts could not resist his friend's summons. He went out on H.M.S. Gorgon, accompanied by Valentine Prinsep [q. v. Suppl. II], the youngest son of his friends at Little Holland House, and stayed seven months, partly watching the excavations with Newton, partly on a visit to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe at Constantinople, where he painted the portrait of the ambassador now in the National Portrait Gallery. His brush was never idle, and he took in impressions of landscape of which the picture ‘The Island of Cos’ was a chief result. Returning in June 1857, he resumed work on the Lincoln's Inn fresco. During this summer Tennyson was a visitor at Little Holland House, and Watts painted the first of several portraits of him. In this year also Rossetti, with whom Watts was already on friendly terms, brought to him for the first time his young disciple Burne-Jones, whose genius the elder master with characteristic generosity recognised and with whom he maintained to the end a cordial friendship. In 1859 he painted the portrait of Gladstone now in the National Portrait Gallery. In the same year the Lincoln's Inn fresco was completed amidst general congratulations. Watts had in the meanwhile continued his fresco work for Lord Somers in London, and had undertaken new work of the same kind for Lord Lansdowne at Bowood, where his subjects were ‘Coriolanus’ and ‘Achilles parted from Briseis.’ Among his well-known pictures begun in these years were ‘The Genius of Greek Poetry,’ ‘Time, Death, and Judgment,’ ‘Esau,’ ‘Chaos’ (from the original ‘House of Life’ scheme), and ‘Sir Galahad.’
To escape the fogs and glooms of London, Watts spent several winters before and after 1860 at Sandown House, Esher, the home of a sister of Thoby Prinsep. Here he lived in the intimacy of the Orleans princes, then at Claremont, and of Sir Alexander and Lady (Lucy) Duff Gordon and their circle, including George Meredith [q. v. Suppl. II]. He was a skilled rider, and gained health hunting with the Old Surrey foxhounds and the Duc d'Aumale's harriers on his favourite thoroughbred mare Undine. He took an eager interest and such share as his strength enabled him in the volunteer movement of the time. In the following years he formed a new and affectionate intimacy with Frederic Leighton, who in 1866 built the well-known house and studio in Holland Road, almost adjoining the Little Holland House garden. Another valued addition to the circle was Joachim the musician; and yet another, Sir John Herschel the astronomer: Watts's portraits of these friends are among his best work. John Lothrop Motley, then American minister in England, was a welcome sitter about this time. Through the initiative of Dean Milman, Watts was chosen to design figures of St. Matthew and St. John to be done in mosaic in St. Paul's: the dean's further wish that he should be charged with a whole scheme of interior decoration for the cathedral failed to take effect. Portraits of Lord Shrewsbury, ​Lord Lothian, and the three Talbot sisters (of whom one was Lady Lothian) led to visits at Blickling and Ingestre. The incurable illness under which Lord Lothian was suffering suggested the motive of the painter's ‘Love and Death,’ the most popular and perhaps the finest of his symbolic designs. Of this subject, as of so many others, Watts painted in the ensuing years several versions varying in scale and handling. New sitters, who soon became admiring friends and buyers, continued to come about him: among them Sir William Bowman the oculist in 1863, and Mr. Charles Rickards of Manchester in 1865. The intelligent sympathy with his aims and enthusiasm for his work shown by the last-named friend was to the end of his life one of the artist's most valued encouragements. Meantime a change, sudden and of brief duration, had passed over his life. Miss Ellen Terry, then in the radiance of her early girlhood, was brought into the circle. A marriage, foredoomed to failure, was arranged between her and the recluse, half-invalid painter nearly thirty years her senior. This was in February 1864; in June of the next year they parted by consent, and in 1877 Watts sought and obtained a divorce.
To give a fixed date to any work of Watts is apt to be misleading, since it was his habit to paint upon a single picture, or upon variations and replicas of a single design, through many successive years. The decade 1860–70 saw the inception of most, and the completion of some, of the works in painting and sculpture by which he remains best known to the world. Such were in painting ‘The Court of Death’; a series of three pictures on the story of Eve, and another of three on the story of Cain, each charged with a weight of brooding ethical and symbolic suggestion; ‘The Return of the Dove’; the landscape ‘Carrara Mountains’; with the classical subjects of ‘Ariadne in Naxos,’ ‘The Childhood of Zeus,’ ‘The Judgment of Paris,’ ‘Daphne,’ ‘Thetis,’ ‘Diana and Endymion,’ ‘Orpheus and Eurydice,’ and the so-called ‘Wife of Pygmalion,’ which was the interpretation in paint of a Greek bust in the Chantrey collection at Oxford. To these years also belong some of his finest female portraits, e.g. those of Lady Margaret Beaumont, Lady Bath, Mrs. Percy Wyndham, and Miss Edith Villiers, afterwards Countess of Lytton. From the same or the next following period date many of his portraits of celebrities now in the National Portrait Gallery, including those of Rossetti, Swinburne, Burne-Jones, Robert Lowe, Lord Aberdare, Lord Lawrence, Thomas Carlyle, and John Stuart Mill—the latter painted just before the philosopher's death in 1873. From this time also dates the devotion of a large part of the artist's time to works of sculpture. First came the mythological bust of Clytie struggling out of her flower-calyx; then an effigy of Mr. Thomas Owen for Condover church; then one of Bishop Lonsdale for Lichfield Cathedral; and later again a monument to Lord Lothian for Blickling. For his work as a sculptor Watts built himself a new studio in the Little Holland House garden. Finding that the Prinseps' lease of the place would expire in 1871, he tried unsuccessfully to secure a ten years' extension. Lord Holland had died in 1869, and his widow was now urged to sell this corner of the estate for the benefit of the rest. The tenancy was thenceforth only from year to year, and Watts foresaw with dismay that he would have to change his home and place of work. He bought some acres in the Isle of Wight adjoining Tennyson's property of Farringford, with intent to build there a house that should be for the Prinseps a permanent and for himself an occasional home. To provide the means for this and also for his own accommodation in London he forced himself to the distasteful task of miscellaneous portrait-painting. At the same time he continued to labour at the Condover and Blickling monuments and also at the statue of the first Lord Holland, done in conjunction with Edgar Boehm, which now stands behind the fountain facing the street from Holland Park. In 1870 the idea of a great equestrian statue for the Duke of Westminster of his ancestor Hugh Lupus, Warden of the Marches, was first mooted and the sketch begun. In the same year he painted a version of the ‘Denunciation of Cain,’ the second subject of the symbolic trilogy above mentioned, as his diploma picture for the Royal Academy. Without submitting his name as a candidate he had been elected an associate of that body in 1867 and a full member immediately afterwards. Four years earlier, as a witness before the parliamentary commission of 1863, he had made extremely candid comments on what he thought the Academy's errors and shortcomings: so that the honour now done him was an act of some generosity.
In 1872 Watts began to build The Briary at Freshwater, and in London two ​years later a new Little Holland House in Melbury Road, not two hundred yards from the old. The Prinseps occupied The Briary in the spring of 1874, Watts remaining at the old Little Holland House till August 1875. In the meantime he had painted one of his best allegorical pictures, 'The Spirit of Christianity,' as well as an official portrait of the Prince of Wales. After spending most of the winter at Freshwater he achieved the trying labour of shifting the accumulations of his life's work from one house to the other, and got settled in Melbury road by February 1876. Here he received in the following years many friendly services from his neighbours Mr. and Mrs. Russell Barrington: services which the lady has fully recorded in the volume cited at foot of this article. In 1877 he suffered a great loss by the death of Mrs. Nassau Senior. In the same year his public reputation was much enhanced by the first exhibition at the newly opened Grosvenor Gallery, to which he sent a large version of 'Love and Death' and three of his finest portraits. In this and subsequent exhibitions at the same place, and afterwards at the New Gallery, his contributions were more effectively seen than on the walls of the Royal Academy, where work of more popular aim seemed to crowd them out of sight. Every year confirmed his conviction that art should have a mission beyond the pleasure of the eye, and that the artist should strive to benefit and uplift his fellow-men by appealing through their visual sense to their hearts and consciences. Pictures of symbolic and ethical significance became more and more the main effort of his life, his purpose being in the end to offer what he thought the best of them to the nation. At the same time portraits, principally of sitters chosen by himself with the same object, continued to occupy him. He also gave much of his time and strength to a colossal equestrian statue which he called 'Physical Energy.' This was a variation upon his design of the original Hugh Lupus monument for the Duke of Westminster, so carried out as to gain a more abstract and universal significance.
In 1878 Thoby Prinsep died, and his widow moved to a house at Brighton, where a studio was arranged for Watts's occasional use. The Briary being given up. In 1880 Mr. Rickards's entire collection of pictures by Watts, fifty-six in number, was exhibited at the Manchester Institution, and made a great impression. In 1881 he was persuaded to publish some of his thoughts on art in the 'Nineteenth Century,' to which he continued afterwards to be an occasional contributor. Other friends, particularly Lady Marian Alford [q. v. Suppl. I] and her circle, engaged his active interest in the work of the School of Needlework: an interest which was afterwards extended to the Home Arts and Industries Association and the Arts and Crafts Guild. To the working studios which formed part of the new Little Holland House a separate exhibition studio was in 1881 attached, to which the public were admitted on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. A winter exhibition of two hundred of his pictures at the Grosvenor Gallery (1881-2) further increased his reputation with the general public. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge having each proposed to confer upon him its honorary degree, he at first wished to decline these honours, but was ultimately persuaded to accept them (1882). The exhibition of some of his pictures at Paris moved to enthusiasm a young American lady, Miss Mead (afterwards Mrs. Edwin Abbey), whose energy organised in 1885 a display of his work in New York, thus spreading his fame to the western hemisphere. In 1885 he was offered a baronetcy by Gladstone, but declined it. His perfectly sincere diffidence as to the ultimate value of his work (though not as to the rightness of his aims) made him at all times shrink from official honours or public praise lest posterity should think they had been ill bestowed. In 1886 he learned officially that his proposal ultimately to present to the nation both a series of symbolic pictures and a series of contemporary portraits would be warmly welcomed. But despite these evidences of recognition, and despite the general honour and affection which surrounded him, the loneliness of his home and the weakness of his health, together with his ever-present sense of the gulf between his ideals and his achievement, caused him frequent depression.
In 1886 a new happiness came into his life through his marriage with a friend and disciple of some years' standing. Miss Mary Fraser Tytler. Helped by her wise tendance and devoted companionship, he lived on to a patriarchal age, through eighteen years more of fruitful industry, only interrupted by occasional illness and only darkened by the successive deaths of nearly all the friends of his early and middle life. The summers were spent ​regularly at the new Little Holland House; the first winter and spring in Egypt, with rests at Malta, Constantinople, and Athens; the next (1887-8) at Malta, where his work was interrupted by illness, and at Mentone; the third (1890-1) at Monkshatch on the Hog's Back, the home of his friends Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Hichens. The climate here specially suiting him, he decided to acquire and build on a picturesque wooded site near by. The house, called Limnerslease, was finished in the summer of 1891. Thenceforward his winters were regiilarly spent there, and as time went on a great part of his summers also. In 1894 he declined a second offer of a baronetcy from Gladstone. In 1895, as the new building for the National Portrait Gallery was approaching completion, he arranged to present to it fifteen paintings and two drawings of distinguished contemporaries; the number of his works there has since doubled. In 1897 his eightieth birthday was celebrated by an exhibition of his oolleoted works at the New Gallery and the presentation of a widely signed address of congratulation. In the same year he made to the National Gallery of British Art a gift of some twenty of his chief symbolic and allegoric paintings. He published a proposal to commemorate the jubilee of Queen Victoria by a monument to the obscure and quickly forgotten doers of heroic deeds in daily civic life. The project hung fire, but he him self did something towards realising it by presenting to the public, in what is known as the Postmen's Park at St. Botolph's, Aldersgate, a shelter or covered corridor where inscriptions recording such deeds should be put up: this was completed and opened in 1900. He was much interested in the character and career of Cecil Rhodes [q. v. Suppl. II], and in 1897 began a portrait of him which remains unfinished. In 1898 he began at Limnerslease a labour of love in the shape of a monumental statue of Tennyson for Lincoln. A strong new interest in his life was the school of decorative terra-cotta work successfully started by Mrs. Watts in the village of Compton, close beside their home. In 1899 he made a summer trip to Inverness-shire — his first visit to Scotland — and brought back pictures of Scottish landscape marked by the same qualities of style, breadth, and grave splendour of colour and atmospheric effect as his earlier impressions of Asia Minor or the Bay of Naples or the Carrara Mountains or the Riviera. In 1902 the Order of Merit was instituted by King Edward VII. Watts was named one of the original twelve members, and accepted without demur the proffered honour, the only one he had so accepted in his life. In the same year he consented to a suggestion of Lord Grey that his equestrian statue of 'Physical Energy,' at which he had laboured for many years but which was not yet finished to his mind, should be cast in bronze for South Africa as a memorial to Rhodes's achievement as a pioneer of empire. Another cast has since the artist's death been placed in Lancaster Walk, Kensington Gardens. In 1903 he decided to give up Little Holland House and make limnerslease his only home, and as a preliminary step built a gallery there a furlong from his house, to receive the pictures remaining on his hands; this was opened to the public in April 1904, and has since been much extended and enriched.
All this while there had been no falling-off in Watts's industry as a painter, and little in his power of hand. To the last fifteen or twenty years of his life belong such symbolic paintings as 'Sic transit,' 'Love Triumphant,' 'For he had Great Possessions,' 'Industry and Greed,' 'Faith, Hope and Charity,' 'The Slumber of the Ages,' 'The Sower of the Systems,' and such portraits as those of George Meredith, Lord Roberts, Mr. Gerald Balfour, Mr. Walter Crane, and Mr. Charles Booth, with others of himself and of Tennyson. The last portrait of himself, an experiment in the tempera medium, was painted in March 1904. During this spring he had several attacks of illness, but none that seemed alarming, till one day in early June he caught a chill working in the London garden studio in an east wind; he lacked strength for resistance, and died three weeks later, on 1 July 1904, in his eighty-eighth year. He was buried at Compton, near the mortuary chapel built there from his wife's designs.
The number of paintings left by Watts is computed at something like eight hundred, so that not a tithe of them has been mentioned above. Besides the twenty-five which are in the Tate Gallery, the thirty-six in the National Portrait Gallery, and a large number at Limnerslease, others have through the generosity of the artist found homes in most of the important public galleries of the United Kingdom and the colonies; the rest remain scattered in private hands.
To his contemporaries Watts set a great ​example by unremitting industry and lofty purpose, by sweetness, dignity, and generosity of mind and character, and by the absolute devotion of all his powers to the benefit of his race and country as he conceived it. Other English artists before him who had thought nobly of their art and its mission, such as James Barry [q. v.] and Benjamin Robert Haydon [q. v.], had been deluded by pride and vanity into crediting themselves with gifts and aptitudes which they did not possess. Watts was beyond measure both generous in his estimate of other men's work and modest in his estimate of his own. A sense of failure pursued him always, yet never embittered him nor deterred him from striving after what he conceived to be the highest. 'I would have liked,' he said, 'to do for modern thought what Michelangelo did for theological thought.' But even to the genius of Michelangelo his achievement was possible only because of the great and unbroken collective traditions, both technical and spiritual, which he inherited. In the modern world no such tradition exists, and Watts was compelled to embody, by technical methods of his own devising, not the consenting thoughts of whole generations, but only his own private thoughts, on human life and destiny. His conceptions were as a rule so sane, so simple, so broad and general in their significance, that the painted symbols in which they are expressed present no ambiguity and can be read without an effort, appealing happily and harmoniously to the visual emotions before making their further appeal to the moral emotions and human sympathies. They vary greatly in power of vision and presentment, but hardly ever lack rhythmical flow and beauty, as well as originality, of composition, or richness of inventive and suggestive colour. The best of them, such as 'Love and Death,' 'Love and Life,' 'Love Triumphant,' 'The Spirit of Christianity,' and the Eve trilogy, seem never likely to be regarded as other than masterpieces of the painter's art. The same is true of many of his purely poetic compositions, whether from the classics or from later romantic literature, such as 'Diana and Endymion,' 'Orpheus and Eurydice' (especially in the first version), and 'Fata Morgana.' Where various versions of the same subject on different scales exist, it is generally the smaller rather than the larger or monumental version which is technically the most satisfying and the most directly handled. Watts might easily have been a master of brilliant and showily effective technique had he chosen. Some of his earlier work shows a remarkable aptitude that way; but he deliberately checked it, and laboured all his life, humbly and experimentally, to emulate the higher and subtler qualities which roused him to enthusiasm in Attic sculpture and Venetian painting. The result is generally a certain reticent and tentative method of handling, which does not, however, exclude either splendour of colouring or richness and vitality of surface. Something of the same reticence and tentativeness, the same undemonstrative brushwork, with an earnest and often highly successful imaginative endeavour to bring to the surface the inward and spiritual character of his sitters, marks the whole range of his portraits; at least of his male portraits; sometimes in those of women, as of Mrs. Cavendish Bentinck and her children. Lady Margaret Beaumont, Mrs. Nassau Senior, Mrs. Percy Wyndham, he let himself go, and produced effects of splendid opulence and power. The Victorian age was fortunate in having an artist of so fine a strain to interpret and record the beauty and graciousness of its best women and the breeding and intellect and distinction of its best men.
In person Watts was of middle height and rather slenderly made, the frame in later life somewhat bowed, but to the end suggesting the power of tenacious activity. The face was long, the features finely cut, the expression thoughtful and benign. His hair was brown, with a full moustache drooping into the beard; in later years it turned grey almost to whiteness and the beard was worn shorter. In and after middle age, with a small velvet skull-cap worn on the back of his head, he bore a remarkable resemblance to the portraits of Titian. There are many portraits of him, mostly by his own hand: one of the best is that which he painted in middle life for Sir William Bowman and is now in the Tate Gallery. He had a leisurely fulness and pensiveness in his way of speaking, and a beautiful simple courtesy and geniality of manner.
S. C.