Watts (1817-1904) | Page 4

category
of dream visions, aspirations, and we have nothing very distinct except
the sentiment. If the painting is bad--the writing, the language of art, it
is a pity. The picture is then not so good as it should be, but the thought
is there, and the thought is what the artist wanted to express, and it is or
should be impressed on the spectator."
In 1886 his pictures were exhibited in New York, where they created a
great sensation; but incidents connected with the exhibition, and
criticisms upon it, caused the artist much nervous distress.
[Illustration: PLATE III.--HOPE
(At the Tate Gallery)
At the first glance it is rather strange that such a picture should bear
such a title, but the imagery is perfectly true. The heavens are
illuminated by a solitary star, and Hope bends her ear to catch the
music from the last remaining string of her almost shattered lyre. The
picture was painted in 1885 and given to the nation in 1897. A very
fine duplicate is in the possession of Mrs. Rushton.]
It was a peculiar difficulty of his nature which led him to insist, on the
occasions of the London and provincial exhibitions of his pictures, that
the borrowers were to make all arrangements with his frame-maker,
that he should not be called upon to act in any way, and that no
personal reference should be introduced. Watts always considered
himself a private person; he disliked public functions and fled from
them if there were any attempt to draw attention to him. His habits of
work were consistent with these unusual traits. At sunrise he was at his
easel. During the hot months of summer he was hard at work in his
London studio, leaving for the country only for a few weeks during
foggy weather.
At the age of sixty-nine Watts married Miss Mary Fraser-Tytler, with
whom he journeyed to Egypt, painting there a study of the "Sphinx,"
one of the cleverest of his landscapes. Three years after his return, he
settled at Limnerslease, Compton, in Surrey, where he took great
interest in the attempt to revive industrial art among the rural
population.
Twice, in 1885 and 1894, the artist refused, for private reasons, the
baronetcy that other artists had accepted. He lived henceforth and died

the untitled patriot and artist, George Frederick Watts.

II
THE MAN AND THE MESSENGER
Having given in the preceding pages the briefest possible outline of the
life of Watts as a man amongst men, we are now able to come to closer
quarters. He was essentially a messenger--a teacher, delivering to the
world, in such a manner that his genius and temperament made possible,
ideas which had found their place in his mind. He would have been the
first to admit that without these ideas he would be less than nothing.
If it were possible to bring together all the external acts of the painter's
life, his journeyings to and fro, his making and his losing friends, we
should have insufficient data to enable us to understand Watts' message;
his great ambitions, his constant failures, his intimate experiences, his
reflections and determinations--known to none but himself--surely
these, the internal life of Watts, are the real sources of his message?
True, he was in the midst of the nineteenth century, breathing its
atmosphere, familiar with the ideals of its great men, doubting,
questioning, and hoping with the rest. To him, as to many a
contemporary stoic, the world was in a certain sense an alien ground,
and mortal life was to be stoically endured and made the best of. It is
impossible to believe, however, that this inspiring and prophetic painter
reproduced and handed on merely that which his time and society gave
him. His day and his associates truly gave him much; the past and his
heredity made their contributions; but we must believe that the purest
gold was fired in the crucible of his inner experience, his joys and his
sufferings. In him was accomplished that great discovery which the
philosophers have called Pessimism; he not only saw in other men (as
depicted in his memorable canvas of 1849), but he experienced in
himself the transitory life's illusions. To Watts, the serious man of fifty
years, Love and Death, Faith and Hope, Aspiration, Suffering, and
Remorse, were not, as to the eighteenth-century rhymester, merely
Greek ladies draped in flowing raiment; to him they were realities,
intensely focussed in himself. Watts was giving of himself, of his
knowledge and observation of what Love is and does, and how Death
appears so variously; and who but a man who knew the melancholy of
despair could paint that picture "Hope"?

Immediately after the central crisis of his personal life appeared the
canvas entitled "Fata Morgana," illustrative of a knight in vain