That eminent Victorian George Frederick Watts — Strachey thought of including him in his seminal study but was sadly deflected — is at last undergoing something of a revival. In his lifetime one of the most famous of contemporary painters (though his works never sold for quite the vast sums realised by Millais or Burne-Jones), Watts has been neglected. His ambition was to be a history painter, and he spent much of his long life and considerable energies on allegorical pictures, which today find little favour. His portraits, which he often used as a means of subsidising his less popular High Art compositions, are recognised as supreme examples of the art, and were given a comprehensive showing at the National Portrait Gallery in 2004.
His second wife built a museum to his work, near Guildford in the leafy Surrey village of Compton, and this is now urgently in need of restoration. Part of the scheme to raise awareness of its plight is a splendid display of Watts’s landscape paintings, a little-known aspect of his oeuvre. Previously shown in June at the supportive St James’s dealership of Nevill Keating, this exhibition is the first devoted to his landscapes to be mounted anywhere in the world.
Watts (1817–1904) was the son of an impoverished Hereford piano-maker, and was largely self-taught. In 1843 he won a prize to decorate with history paintings the new Houses of Parliament, and travelled to Italy on the prize money. He studied fresco there and absorbed the classical approach to landscape painting, which was to influence all his subsequent explorations in that genre. No parliamentary commission emerged from Watts’s proposals though he won first prize in a second competition. He became known instead as a portrait painter until his allegories were shown in the early 1880s, when they began to exert a tenacious hold on the popular imagination. Watts Fever reached its height towards the end of his life and during the first world war, when men and women flocked to a gallery in the Tate hung with his paintings to seek solace in time of need. It became a sort of secular chapel like the Rothko room is today. Reproductions of hugely famous images such as ‘Hope’ (known as ‘Patience on a Monument’ to its detractors), depicting a blindfold girl with but one string left to her lyre, were hung in households throughout the land, and brought comfort to millions. Obvious in its symbolism, perhaps, but no less effective for that.
Variously known as ‘England’s Michelangelo’ or the ‘Kensington Titian’, Watts was as full of ambition as he was of lofty ideals. He said he found painting ‘very like torture’, but never ceased to apply himself to it, even after he took up sculpture when he was 50. He painted landscapes throughout his career, but to begin with as a predominantly private indulgence. Landscape for him was not a matter of the higher naturalism, but rather an imaginative response to the spirit of place. Constable, for instance, was of limited interest to him. Watts didn’t want to paint what he saw so much as ‘the impression left on the mind’. Yet in his finished pictures he often remained remarkably faithful to his initial sketches. Comparison of the three early watercolour studies of the Carrara mountains, made around 1845 on his first visit to Italy, with subsequent oils on the subject reinforces this belief. (The same mountain ridge reappears in the allegorical ‘Chaos’.) There’s also a very beautiful watercolour of a stand of cedar trees, shown here near a slightly earlier oil which Watts made of a single cedar in the garden of Little Holland House, where he often stayed. The watercolours are a revelation of delicacy and skill.
Watts did not publicly exhibit a landscape until 1868, but the first examples in this delightful show date to 1845, and depict Petraia and Fiesole respectively. Neither is a particularly dramatic prospect, though the latter offers a variety of natural detail and a rich, creamy sky. Nearby is a very strange little painting of the Greek island of Cos, with the upper half given over to a sensitive landscape profile, but the lower containing a frieze of vaporous and sexless figures, no doubt for Watts adding some unspecified allegorical meaning, but for us making it more difficult to take the picture seriously.
Generally, however, Watts kept figures out of his landscapes, and landscape pretty much out of his figure paintings. The resulting pure landscapes were most often painted, and repainted, in the studio. (A late picture, such as the Tate’s impressive ‘Study of Clouds’, was worked on over ten years.) The exception here is ‘Helwan’, an oil-on-paper sketch carried out in 1887 when Watts was on his second honeymoon in Egypt. It is disappointing: a flattish, uninflected scene with a couple of pyramids like pimples on the horizon. Far more arresting is ‘A Sea Ghost’ of the same period, a subtle grey penumbral study of a ship appearing through fog, like the wreck of the Mary Deare. In this painting, as in the radiant ‘After the Deluge; the Forty-First Day’, Watts is edging towards Turnerian or Whistlerian abstraction. The post-Flood picture is a great allegorical image, but also a radical essay in painting light, alive with non-descriptive surface marks worthy of an abstract. Here is the mystical side of Watts. As the poet Arthur Symons noted, ‘his landscape is that of one for whom the finger of God is continually creating the earth over again’.
The Watts Gallery houses the master’s studio collection in a listed Grade 2* Arts-and-Crafts-style building. Entering through the lead-faced doors decorated with stylised leaves and flowers, either right into the main galleries, or left down into the sculpture wing, the visitor is struck by the singular atmosphere. It is welcoming but conspiratorial, intimate yet uplifting. The green walls and gold ceilings are an oddly appropriate setting for Watts’s art. There’s a beautiful portrait of the artist as a romantic young man, and the famous ‘Wounded Heron’, a moving and exquisitely painted early work, done for typically humanitarian reasons. (Watts was also moved by the suffering of the starving Irish, and painted several avant-garde social-conscience pictures of considerable power.) There are other portraits — particularly fine is the recently acquired Ionides family group — and the masterly ‘Paolo and Francesca’ (1872–5). Elsewhere a version of ‘Mammon’, a hideous bestial figure, crushes the life out of hopeful youth. This place is unique: there’s nothing like it anywhere else in the country. (Ring 01483 810235 for opening times.)
You can help to save and renovate the Watts Gallery by phoning in to the BBC2 programme Restoration Village on Friday, 15 September and voting for Compton (www.bbc.co.uk/restoration). Watts, who was instrumental in founding both the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery and gave up much of his life to public-spirited work, in turn deserves our support now.
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