its lack of any straining after purely technical effects. The idea to be expressed is of far higher importance to him than the manner of expressing it. The statement of it should be a matter of good, sound workmanship, not of artistic agility or manual dexterity. To say what he has to say as clearly and briefly as may be is his aim, and when he has achieved the effect he desires, the method of his doing so is of no further moment. In the use of paint as paint, in the intrinsic beauties of surface and handling, he would seem in his later years to take no delight. Thus in parts of the picture the rough, coarse canvas he prefers may be so thinly covered that every fibre of the material can be seen, while in others a richly modelled impasto loads the surface. He employs, as far as possible, pure colours laid on in direct juxtaposition or broken into and across each other, not blended and commingled on the palette. He eschews all elaboration of detail and, except in portraiture, works rarely from the living model, neglecting minor delicacies of form or passages of local colour, conventionalizing to a standard of his own rather than idealizing—a process not always unproductive of faults of drawing and proportion, as in the figure of “Faith” (1896), or of singularities of tint, as in the curious leaden face and prismatic background in “The Dweller in the Innermost” (1886). He avoids, as a rule, the use of definite outline, leaving the limits of his forms to melt imperceptibly into the background; nor does texture interest him greatly, and a uniform fresco-like surface is apt to represent flesh and foliage, distance and foreground alike. He intends deliberately that the things he depicts, be they what they may, shall be symbols, useful for their meaning alone, and he makes no attempt at conferring on them an accurate actuality, which might distract the attention from the paramount idea. That this reticence is intentional may be learned from an examination of his earliest works, in which the accessories are rendered with a precise, if sometimes a dry, truthfulness of observation; that it is not due to carelessness or indifference is shown by the inexhaustible patience with which each picture has been executed. His earlier pictures are unsurpassed in the art of England for fine technical qualities of colour and delicacy of handling. Though working unceasingly. Watts never hurried the completion of any canvas. Of two slightly differing versions of “Fata Morgana,” both begun in 1847, the first was not finished before 1870, the second not until ten years later. Even after finishing a picture sufficiently for exhibition, he often subsequently worked further upon it. The portrait of Lord Leighton, exhibited in 1881, was repainted in 1888; the version of “Love and Death,” exhibited in 1877, and 1883, and all the pictures presented to the Tate Gallery in 1897, were more or less retouched when hung there. Furthermore, he painted more than one version of several of his favourite subjects, a circumstance which, combined with the fact that he rarely added the year to his signature and kept no record of his annual production, makes the task of precisely dating his pictures for the most part impossible, while it renders any attempt to dispose his works in periods untrustworthy and artificial, since even the growth and inevitable decay of artistic power are to a considerable extent obscured.
Founded admittedly on the Grecian monuments, there is a sculpturesque rather than pictorial quality in most of his compositions, a regulated disposition which, though imparting often a certain air of unreality and detachment, inspires them nevertheless with that noble impressiveness which forms their most conspicuous characteristic. It is natural, therefore, that in sculpture itself he should also take a high place. A taste for this he acquired as a boy; he was a constant visitor to the studio of Behnes, where he not infrequently made drawings from the casts, though he was never in any sense his pupil. Among his works in this branch of art are a bust of “Clytie” (1868), monuments to the marquis of Lothian, Bishop Lonsdale and Lord Tennyson, a large bronze equestrian statue of “Hugo Lupus” at Eaton Hall (1884), and a colossal one of a man on horseback, emblematically of “Physical Energy,” originally intended for a place on the Embankment, but destined to stand among the Matoppo Hills as an enduring evidence of the artist's admiration for Cecil Rhodes; a replica has been placed in Kensington Gardens. It was the practical idealism of Rhodes that appealed to him, and in this quality Watts himself was by no means lacking. Much of Ills time and attention was given to the promotion of the Home Arts and Industries Association; he assisted Mrs Watts with both money and advice in the founding of an art pottery at Compton, and in the building at the same place of a highly decorated mortuary chapel, carried out almost entirely by local labour; and it was entirely due to his initiative that the erection in Postmen’s Park, Aldersgate Street, London, of memorial tablets to the unsung heroes of everyday life was begun.
Authorities.—M. H. Spielmann, “The Works of Mr G. F. Watts, R.A., with a Catalogue of his Pictures,” Pall Mall Gazette “Extra” (1886); Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady), “G. F. Watts, Royal Academician, His Life and Work,” Art Journal, Extra Number (1896); W. E. T. Britten, “The Work of George Frederick Watts, R.A., LL.D.,” Architectural Review (1888 and 1889); Cosmo Monkhouse, British Contemporary Artists (1889); Charles T. Bateman, G. F. Watts, R.A., Bell’s Miniature Series of Painters (1901); “Mr G. F. Watts, R.A., Character Sketch,” The Review of Reviews (June 1902). (M. Be.)
WATTS, ISAAC (1674–1748), English theologian and hymn writer, son of a clothier, was born at Southampton on the 17th of July 1674. The father, who afterwards had a boarding school at Southampton, also wrote poetry, and a number of his pieces were included by mistake in vol. i. of the son’s Posthumous Works. Isaac Watts is stated to have begun to learn Latin when only in his fifth year, and at the age of seven or eight to have composed some devotional pieces to please his mother. His nonconformity precluded him from entering either of the universities, but in his sixteenth year he went to study at the nonconformist academy at Stoke Newington, of which the Rev. Thomas Rowe, minister of the Independent meeting at Girdlers’ Hall, was then president. On leaving the academy he spent more than two years at home, and began to write his hymns, but in the autumn of 1696 he became tutor in the family of Sir John Hartopp at Stoke Newington, where he probably prepared the materials of his two educational works—Logick, or the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth (1725), and The Knowledge of the Heavens and the Earth made easy, or the First Principles of Geography and Astronomy Explained (1726). In his twenty fourth year Watts was chosen assistant to Dr Isaac Chauncy (1632–1712), pastor of the Independent congregation in Mark Lane, London, and two years later he succeeded as sole pastor. The state of his health, which he had injured by overwork, led to the appointment of an assistant in 1703. In 1704 the congregation removed to Pinner's Hall, and in 1708 they built a new meeting-house in Bury Street. In 1712 Watts was attacked by fever, which incapacitated him for four years from the performance of his duties. In 1712 he went to live with Sir Thomas Abney of Abney Park, where he spent the remainder of his life, the arrangement being continued by Lady Abney after her husband's death. Watts preached only occasionally, devoting his leisure chiefly to the writing of hymns (see Hymns), the preparation of his sermons for publication, and the composition of theological work. In 1706 appeared his Horae Lyricae, of which an edition with memoir by Robert Southey forms vol. ix. of Sacred Classics (1834); in 1707 a volume of Hymns; in 1719 The Psalms of David; and in 1720 Divine and Moral Songs for Children. His Psalms are free paraphrases, rather than metrical versions, and some of them (“God, our help in ages past,” for instance) are amongst the most famous hymns in the language. His religious opinions were more liberal in tone than was at that time common in the community to which he belonged; his views regarding Sunday recreation and labour were scarcely of puritanical strictness; and his Calvinism was modified by his rejection of the doctrine of reprobation. He did not hold the doctrine of the Trinity as necessary to salvation, and he wrote several works on the subject in which he developed views not far removed from Arianism. He died on the 25th of November 1748, and was buried at Bunhill Fields, where a tombstone was erected to his memory by Sir John Hartopp and Lady Abney. A memorial was also erected to him in Westminster Abbey, and a memorial hall, erected in his honour at Southampton, was opened in 1875.
Among the theological treatises of Watts, in addition to volumes of sermons, are Doctrine of the Trinity (1722); Discourses on the Love of God and its Influence on all the Passions (1729); Catechisms for Children and Youth (1730); Essays towards a Proof of a Separate State for Souls (1732); Essay on the Freedom of the Will (1732); Essay on the Strength and Weakness of Human Reason (1737); Essay on the Ruin and Recovery of Mankind (1740); Glory of Christ as God-Man Unveiled (1746); and Useful and Important Questions concerning Jesus, the Son of God (1746). He was also the author of a variety of miscellaneous treatises. His Posthumous Works appeared in 1773, and a further instalment of them in 1779. The Works of. . . Isaac Watts (6 vols.), edited by Dr Jennings and Dr Doddridge, with a memoir compiled by G. Burder, appeared in 1810–1811. His poetical works were included in Johnson’s English Poets, where they were accompanied by a Life, and they appear in subsequent similar collections. See also The Life, Times and Correspondence of Isaac Walts (1834) by Thomas Milner.
WATTS-DUNTON, WALTER THEODORE (1832–), English man of letters, was born at St Ives, Huntingdon, on
the 12th of October 1832, his family surname being Watts, to which he added in 1897 his mother’s name of Dunton. He was
