page_title: Mammon (painting)
section_title: Reception and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Mammon (painting) / Reception and legacy
context_page_description: Mammon, originally exhibited as Mammon. Dedicated to his Worshippers, is an 1885 oil painting by English artist George Frederic Watts, currently in Tate Britain. One of a number of paintings by Watts in this period on the theme of the corrupting influence of wealth, Mammon shows a scene from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in which Mammon, the embodiment of greed, crushes the weak through his indifference to their plight. This reflected Watts's belief that wealth was taking the place of religion in modern society, and that this worship of riches was leading to social deterioration. The painting was one of a group of works Watts donated to the South Kensington Museum in late 1886, and in 1897 it was one of 17 Watts paintings transferred to the newly created Tate Gallery. Although rarely exhibited outside the Tate Gallery, the popularity of reproductions made Mammon one of Watts's better known paintings.
context_section_description: Mammon was first exhibited in 1885, under the title of Mammon. Dedicated to his Worshippers. The catalogue accompanying this exhibition described this unusual title as "righteously scornful". Aside from an oil sketch now in the Watts Gallery, only one completed version of Mammon was made. This was among a number of paintings donated by Watts to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in late 1886. In 1897 it was one of the 17 Watts works transferred to the newly-created Tate Gallery (commonly known as the Tate Gallery, now Tate Britain); at the time, Watts was so highly regarded that an entire room of the new museum was dedicated to his works.
  Although rarely exhibited outside the Tate Gallery, cheap photographic reproductions of Mammon made by Frederick Hollyer circulated widely, making it one of Watts's better-known paintings. In 1887 it was one of the paintings discussed by Scottish theologian P. T. Forsyth in his series of lectures on "Religion in Recent Art". Forsyth considered Mammon a companion to Watts's 1885 Hope, arguing that both depicted false gods and the perils awaiting those who attempted to follow them in the absence of faith. By 1904 the image was well-enough known that the Daily Express reproduced the head of Mammon alongside that of John D. Rockefeller, a person of whom the newspaper greatly disapproved, implicitly inviting readers to draw comparisons.
  Watts returned to the theme of greed in Progress (1902–1904), one of his final works. This shows the figure of Mammon as one of three figures representing what Watts called "non-progress"; academia, wealth and laziness, oblivious to the emergence of Progress on horseback behind them. The central figure was described by Watts as "money grubbing"; as with Mammon and many of his other works, Watts aimed to show spiritual and material values as inherently contradictory.
caption: Progress
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