In July of 1904 the eighty-seven mortal years of George Frederick Watts
came to an end. He had outlived all the contemporaries and acquaintances
of his youth; few, even among the now living, knew him in his middle
age; while to those of the present generation, who knew little of the
man though much of his work, he appeared as members of the Ionides
family, thus inaugurating the series of private and public portraits for
which he became so famous. The Watts of our day, however, the teacher
first and the painter afterwards, had not yet come on the scene. His
first aspiration towards monumental painting began in the year 1843,
when in a competition for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament he
gained a prize of £300 for his cartoon of "Caractacus led Captive
through the Streets of Rome." At this time, when history was claiming
pictorial art as her servant and expositor, young Watts carried off the
prize against the whole of his competitors. This company included the
well-known historical painter Haydon, who, from a sense of the
impossibility of battling against his financial difficulties, and from
the neglect, real or fancied, of the leading politicians, destroyed
himself by his own hand.
The £300 took the successful competitor to Italy, where for four years
he remained as a guest of Lord Holland. Glimpses of the Italy he gazed
upon and loved are preserved for us in a landscape of the hillside town
of Fiesole with blue sky and clouds, another of a castellated villa
and mountains near Florence, and a third of the "Carrara Mountains
near Pisa"; while of his portraiture of that day, "Lady Holland" and
"Lady Dorothy Nevill" are relics of the Italian visit.
[Illustration: PLATE II.--THE MINOTAUR
In this terrible figure, half man, half bull, gazing over the
sea from the battlement of a hill tower, we see the artist's
representation of the greed and lust associated with modern
civilisations. The picture was exhibited at the Winter
Exhibition of the New Gallery, 1896, and formed part of the
Watts Gift in 1897. It hangs in the Watts Room at the Tate
Gallery.]
Italy, and particularly Florence, was perpetual fascination and
inspiration to Watts. There he imbibed the influences of Orcagna and
Titian--influences, indeed, which were clearly represented in the next
monumental painting which he attempted. It came about that Lord Holland
persuaded his guest to enter a fresh competition for the decoration of
the Parliament Houses, and Watts carried off the prize with his "Alfred
inciting the Saxons to resist the landing of the Danes." The colour and
movement of the great Italian masters, conspicuously absent from the
"Caractacus" cartoon, were to be seen in this new effort, where, as has
been said, the English king stands like a Raphaelesque archangel in the
midst of the design.
In 1848 Watts had attained, one might almost say, the position of
official historical painter to the State, a post coveted by the
unfortunate Haydon; and he received a commission to paint a fresco of
"St. George overcomes the Dragon," which was not completed till 1853.
In this year he contributed as an appendix to the Diary of Haydon--in
itself an exciting document, showing how wretched the life of an
official painter then might be--a note telling of the state of
historical and monumental painting in the 'forties, and of his own
attitude towards it; a few of his own words, written before the days of
the "poster," may be usefully quoted here: