country at Limnerslease, Compton, Surrey. Apart from his art, his life was happily uneventful, the sole facts necessary to record being his marriage in 1886 with Miss Mary Fraser-Tytler, an early union with Miss Ellen Terry having been dissolved many years before; his twice receiving (1885 and 1894), but respectfully declining, the offer of a baronetcy; and his inclusion in June 1902 in the newly founded Order of Merit. He died on the 1st of July 1904.
The world is exceptionally well provided with opportunities of judging of the qualities of G. F. Watts's art, for with a noble generosity he presented to his country a representative selection of the best work of his long life. A prominent element in it, and one which must prove of the greatest value to posterity, is the inestimable series of portraits of his distinguished contemporaries, a series no less remarkable for its artistic than for its historical interest. A glance through the list of his subjects shows the breadth of his sympathies and his superiority to creed or party. Among politicians are the duke of Devonshire (1883), Lords Salisbury (1884), Sherbrooke (1882), Campbell (1882), Cowper (1877), Ripon (1896), Dufferin (1897) and Shaftesbury (1882), Mr Gerald Balfour (1899) and Mr John Burns (1897); poets—Tennyson, Swinburne (1884), Browning (1875), Matthew Arnold (1881), Rossetti (1865, and subsequent replica) and William Morris (1870); artists—himself (1864, 1880, and eleven others), Lord Leighton (1871 and 1881), Calderon (1872), Prinsep (1872), Burne-Jones (1870), Millais (1871), Walter Crane (1891), and Alfred Gilbert (1896); literature is represented by John Stuart Mill (exhibited 1874), Carlyle (1869), George Meredith (1893), Max Müller (1895) and |Mr Lecky (1878); music, by Sir Charles Hallé; while among others who have won fame in diverse paths are Lords Napier (1886) and Roberts (1899), General Baden-Powell (1902), Garibaldi, Sir Richard Burton (1882), Cardinal Manning (1882), Dr Martineau (1874), Sir Andrew Clark (1894), George Peabody, Mr Passmore Edwards, Claude Montefiore (1894). Even more significant from an artistic point of view is the great collection of symbolical pictures in the Tate Gallery which forms the artist's message to mankind. Believing devoutly in the high mission of didactic art, he strove ever to carry out his part of it faithfully. To quote his own words: “My intention has not been so much to paint pictures that 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”; and his tenet is that the main object of the painter should be “demanding noble aspirations, condemning in the most trenchant manner prevalent vices, and warning in deep tones against lapses from morals and duties.”
There are not wanting critics who radically dissent from this view of the proper functions of art. It must be admitted that there is force in their objection when the inner meaning of a picture is found to be exceedingly obscure, if not incomprehensible, without a verbal explanation. In the female figure, for instance, bending blindfolded on the globe suspended in space and sounding the sole remaining string upon her lyre, while a single star shines in the blue heavens, it is not obvious to every one that the idea of “Hope” (1885) is suggested. There can be few, nevertheless, who will maintain that his aim is not a lofty one; and the strongest evidence of the artist's greatness, to those who accept his doctrine, is the fact that he has not only striven untiringly for his own ideals, but has very often gloriously attained them. Moreover, in so doing he has not failed on occasion to impart to his work much of that very charm which is to him a secondary consideration, or to exhibit an assured and accomplished mastery of the technical achievement which is to some the primary object and essential triumph of painting. It was, in short, the rare combination of supreme handicraft with a great imaginative intellect which secured to Watts his undisputed place in the public estimation of his day. The grandeur and dignity of his style, the ease and purposefulness of his brushwork, the richness and harmoniousness of his colouring—qualities partly his own, partly derived from his study of Italian masters at an early and impressionable age—are acknowledged even by those to whom his elevated educational intentions are a matter of indifference, if not of absolute disapprobation; while many, to whom his exceptional artistic attainment is a sealed book, have gathered courage or consolation from the grave moral purpose and deep human sympathy of his teaching. He expresses his ideas for the most part in terms of beauty, an idealized, classical beauty of form, a glowing, Venetian beauty of colour, though his conviction of the deadly danger of heaped-up riches, which he vindicated in his life as well as in his work, has, in such cases as “The Minotaur” (exhibited in 1896) “Mammon” (1885) and “Jonah” (1895), where the unveiled vileness of Cruelty and Greed is fearlessly depicted, driven him to the presentment of sheer ugliness or brutality. Far oftener a vast, all-embracing tenderness inspires his work; it is the sorrow, not the sin, that stirs him. When he would rebuke the thoughtless inhumanity which sacrifices its annual hecatombs of innocent birds to fashionable vanity and grasping commerce, it is not upon the blood and cruelty that he dwells, but the pity of it that he typifies in “Dedication” or “The Shuddering Angel” (1892) weeping over the altar spread with Woman's spoils.
Yet it is as a teacher that the artist is seen at his highest: he would sooner point out the true way to those who seek it than admonish those who have wandered. He never wearies of emphasizing the reality of the power of Love, the fallacy underlying the fear of Death. To the early masters Death was a bare and ghastly skeleton, above all things to be shunned; to Watts it is a grand, impressive figure, awful indeed but not horrible, irresistible but not ruthless, a bringer of rest and peace, not to be rashly sought but to be welcomed when the inevitable hour shall strike. “Sic transit” (1892) conveys most completely, perhaps. Watts's lesson on the theme of death. Stretched on a bier and reverently sheeted lies a corpse; strewn neglected on the ground lie the ermine robe of worldly rank, the weapons of the warrior, the lute of the musician, the book of human learning, the palmer's robe of late repentance and the roses of fleeting pleasures; the laurel crown remains as the one thing worth the winning, and the inscription “What I spent I had; what I saved I lost; what I gave I have,” points the moral. Such is the significance of the still more masterly “Court of Death” (finally completed 1902 and now in the Tate Gallery). To the same early masters Love was usually a mere distributor of sensual pleasures, a tricksy spirit instinct with malice and bringing more harm than happiness to humanity, though neither was of much moment. Watts has not altogether ignored this view, and in “Mischief” (1878) has portrayed Man, love-led, entangled among the thorns of he world; but, in the main, Love to him is the chief guide and helper of mankind along the barren, rock-strewn path of life, through whom alone he can attain the higher levels, and who triumphs in the end over Death itself. To these views on the all-importance of love a trilogy of pictures in the Tate Gallery gives full expression. In the first, “Love and Life,” exhibited in 1885, a replica of an earlier picture in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and of another version presented by him to the Luxembourg, Paris, Love, a figure in the prime of manhood, leads and supports the slender, clinging girl who symbolizes Life up to the craggy mountain-top, while he partly shields her from the blast under a broad wing. Of this he himself said, “Probably ‘Love and Life’ best portrays my message to the age. Life, represented by the female figure, never could have reached such heights unless protected and guided by Love”;[1] and in the prefatory note to the exhibition of his works in 1896 he wrote, “The slight female figure is an emblem of the fragile quality in humanity, at once its weakness and its strength; sensibility, aided by Love, sympathy, tenderness, self-sacrifice, and all that the range of the term implies, humanity ascends the rugged path from brutality to spirituality.” The limitations of earthly love are shown in the second “Love and Death,” one version of which was exhibited in 1877 and others in 1896, &c. In this, Love, a beautiful boy, striving vainly to bar the door to the mighty figure of Death, is thrust back with crushed wings powerless to stay the advance; but that the defeat is merely apparent and temporary is suggested rather than asserted by the third “Love Triumphant” (1895), where Time, with broken scythe, and Death lie prostrate, while the same youth, with widespread wings and face and arms upraised to heaven, stands between them on tiptoe as if preparing to soar aloft. Though the purely symbolical is the most distinctive side of Watts's art, it is by no means the only one. He has drawn inspiration largely from both the Old and New Testaments, more rarely from the poets and classical myths; still more rarely he has treated subjects of modern life, though even in these he has not abandoned his moral purpose, but has sought out such incidents, whether fictitious or historical, as will serve him in conveying some lesson or monition. The three pictures of the story of Eve in the Tate Gallery, “She shall be called woman” (1892), “Eve Tempted” and “Eve Repentant” (both exhibited in 1896), and “The Curse of Cain” (1872) in the Diploma Gallery, may be cited as examples of the first; “For he had great possessions” (1894) of the second; “Sir Galahad” (1862), “Orpheus and Eurydice” and “Psyche” (1880), of the third; and “The Irish Famine” (about 1847) and “A Patient Life of Unrewarded Toil” (1890), of the last of these. Never has he treated religion from a sectarian point of view.
Watts is before all things a painter with a grave and earnest purpose, painting because that form of expression was easier to him than writing, though he has published some few articles and pamphlets, chiefly on art matters; but he, too, has his lighter side, and has daintily treated the humorously fanciful in “Good luck to your fishing” (1889); “The habit does not make the monk” (1889), in which Cupid, half-hidden under the frock, taps maliciously at a closed door; and “Trifles Light as Air” (exhibited 1901), a swarm of little amorini drifting in the summer air like a cloud of gnats; while in “Experientia docet B.C.” (1890), a primeval woman watching with admiration, not unmixed with anxiety, the man who has first swallowed an oyster, he condescends, not very successfully, to the frankly comic. These must be regarded, however, as merely the relaxations of the serious mind that has left its impress even on the relatively few, but very admirable, landscapes he produced, in which, as for instance “The Carrara Mountains from Pisa” (188l), a sober dignity of treatment is conspicuous.
Watts's technique is as individual as his point of view. It is chiefly remarkable for its straightforwardness and simplicity, and
- ↑ C. F. Watts, R.A., by Charles T. Bateman.
