The reputation of George Frederick Watts (1817–1904) has not fared well for the past 80 years or so. He was much admired during his lifetime (his friend and fellow-artist Lord Leighton even dubbed him ‘England’s Michelangelo’), and his allegories of repentance and hope were still popular during the first world war, but his stock has slumped since then. Perhaps he was dangerously overrated while alive (the fate of so many artists, whose posthumous fall is then all the more evident — think of Graham Sutherland, whose vogue is only now returning more than 20 years after his death); certainly Watts was a shrewd self-promoter, who not only left substantial holdings of his own work to national museums (including the NPG), but also allowed a gallery to be founded in his name near Godalming in Surrey. How sincere was this typically industrious product of the Victorian Age?
It is perhaps too easy to ridicule the man who liked to be called ‘Signor’ by his close friends and who recklessly courted comparison with the Old Masters. In fact, it’s very good to have the chance now to see more than 50 of Watts’s prime portraits, many of them borrowed from private collections. Even if the NPG’s exhibition opens somewhat equivocally with an unbearably affected portrait of Mary Augusta, Lady Holland, Watts’s principal early patron. Although closely based compositionally on Rubens’s ‘Chapeau de Paille’ and Reynolds’s ‘Nelly O’Brien’, the mood of this painting is far less pleasing. Despite the ‘Riviera’ hat and the Tuscan hill setting, the overall impression is sentimental if not downright coy. Infinitely preferable are the three other portraits of Lady Holland in the next bay of the installation, particularly the more formal but sensitive profile of her with a wreath of country blossoms in her hair, from c.1843–4. At this point a cabinet of drawings is introduced to remind us what a skilful and effective draughtsman Watts was. The newly discovered pencil portrait of Mary Augusta rather eclipses the painted versions in its revealing intimacy and directness. It makes a striking contrast with the oddly cartoon-like image of the puffed-out pouter-pigeon figure of ‘Count’ Cottrell nearby, looking like something imagined by Edward Lear.
The exhibition does not claim to be comprehensive — there is none of Watts’s portrait sculpture, nor is there work from his earliest years — but within its parameters it gives a good idea of the artist’s strengths and weaknesses. I found particularly appealing the ‘neoclassic’ period of his work, when it is evident that Watts had been looking at Ingres, and painted with a clarity and deftness which also illuminates character. Look at the powerful profile of the exiled politician and man of letters Fran
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