Watts the artist
Born in London in 1817, George Frederick Watts, at a very young age, was discovered by his father to have great artistic talent. With the encouragement of his father and the guidance of sculptor William Behnes, young Watts created drawings that earned his admission to the Royal Academy Schools in 1835. By the age of eighteen, Watts had displayed great aptitude and sensitivity in small-scale portraits and history paintings. His belief in the ideals of “high art” set the early stages of his development as an esteemed history painter, with subjects influenced by classical literature and containing moral, classicizing themes.
G. F. Watts's rapid success is reflected in his contributions of several portraits to Royal Academy exhibitions in 1837, 1838, and 1840. He also produced subject-pictures, exhibited at the British Institution, and won competitions for paintings to adorn the Houses of Parliament. The prize money allowed Watts to travel extensively around Italy for several years, and to study Venetian paintings and techniques, in particular, before returning to London in 1847. Watts was elected Associate of the Royal Academy on January 31, 1867, and elevated to Academician in 1868.
As an advocate for the public role of art, Watts was interested in producing large-scale fresco paintings to adorn public buildings. Throughout the 1850s and through the early 1860s, Watts participated in several ambitious projects, including a large fresco, Justice: A Hemicycle of Lawgivers, for the east wall of the Great Hall of Lincoln’s Inn, completed in 1859. He was also interested in commissioned portraits, often in the grand-manner style, and in portraits of sitters he chose himself, such as Robert Browning in 1866. An oil version of one of his fresco paintings, Paolo and Francesca, is displayed to the viewer’s right in Joseph Parkin Mayall’s photograph.
Not only was Watts successful in producing notable portraits, subject-paintings, and historical works, but the artist was also preoccupied with allegorical paintings that expressed his ideas on nature and humanity. By the 1880s, he had begun pursuing his ambition of working on non-narrative symbolic works, introducing ideas of death, spiritualism, and the transitory qualities of life itself. Many of his works from this period, including Orpheus and Eurydice, completed in 1879, would be exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, founded in 1877 by his friend Sir Coutts Lindsay. The style of these works differed from that of the early 1860s, when he was highly influenced by the rich colors of the Aesthetic movement. During this period, his imaginative and allegorical works were combined with classical subject matter to explore ideas of death, spiritualism, and evolution. The first version of Time, Death, and Judgment, finished in 1866, became famous during its exhibition at the Paris Salon of 1880 and from the Saturday–Sunday public openings of his picture gallery at New Little Holland House. The development of international symbolism spurred by Watts's works, along with his global celebrity status as a British artist, inspired many in the younger generation throughout England.
Albertine Lee
Shortly before the time we became his neighbours, Watts had had to face life from a fresh point of view. Circumstances had occurred which made him more than ever desirous of consecrating the whole of his life to his work. The aims and ambitions which had from the first guided his art, had strengthened as his gifts ripened. He repeatedly told us that his sole desire was to give his entire life unremittingly and with single-hearted earnestness to his work; to endeavour by so doing to substantiate ideas which he conceived might and ought to be expressed in the language of art; to use his gifts in the cause of raising art to the same level of culture in England as that on which great poetry and great music stand; in fact, to bring the same high faculties of the human mind and spirit to bear on creations in painting and sculpture that are the sources of the more purely intellectual and abstract expressions in writing and sound. No less from patriotic than from artistic aspirations did Watts long to see the art of England placed in the first rank among the serious concerns and interests of his country.
--Mrs. Russell Barrington, G. F. Watts: Reminiscences (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905), 8–9.