GEORGE FREDERIC WATTS OM RA HRCA (1817-1904) Biography

Provenance

Ronald Chapman, the son of the artist's adopted daughter to the 1970s; sold at:
Sotheby's Belgravia, London
Private Collection USA to 2003

Literature

William Michael Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, London 1868, pages 27-8 and 35-6
Julia Cartwright, George Frederic Watts, R.A., Art Journal: Easter Annual, 1896, page 26
Hugh Macmillan, The Life-Work of George Frederick Watts, R.A., London 1903, pages 273-4
R.E.D. Sketchley, Watts, London 1904, pages 167-9
Mrs Russell Barrington, G.F. Watts: Reminiscences, London 1905, pages 36, 41,42
M.S. Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist's Life, 3 Volumes, London 1912, Volume I: pages 236-7, 241, 244, 250-1, 276-7, Volume 2: page 44-5
Ronald Chapman, The Laurel and the Thorn: A Study of G.F.Watts, London 1945, pages 82-3
R.E. Gutch, G.F. Watt's Sculpture, Burlington Magazine, issue 110, 1968, pages 693-9
Wilfrid Blunt, England's Michelangelo: A Biography of George Frederic Watts, O.M. R.A., London 1975, pages 190-1
Allan Staley, introduction, The Victorian High Renaissance, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1978, pages 16 and 73, catalogue number 16, illustrated page 72
Elizabeth Hutchings, Discovering the Sculptures of George Frederic Watts O.M. R.A., Hunnyhill Publications 1994, pages 29-31, illustrated page 28

Description / Expertise

The water nymph Clytie, daughter of Oceanus, was deserted by her lover Apollo, god of the sun and pined for him each day. With tears streaming down her face and unbound tresses falling over her shoulders, she gazed longingly as he drove the sun chariot across the sky. The gods took pity, transforming Clytie into a sunflower, rooting her limbs in the ground and ensuring that her head would be perpetually turned toward her beloved sun.

Unlike his contemporary Albert Moore, whose quiet studies of beauty were made deliberately without any conventional reference, George Frederic Watts ascribed a poignant symbolism to his work. His friend and neighbour, Mrs Barrington, suggests the probable reason that Watts chose to portray the tragic Clytie was his unhappy marriage to the nascent actress Ellen Terry. The work was begun after their separation in the winter of 1864-5.

G. F. Watts’s love of the grace and elegance of Greek sculpture and of the masters of the Italian Renaissance naturally influenced the visual power of Clytie’s pose. A Roman sculpted marble bust of Clytie in the British Museum may have been Watt’s first inspiration, however his bust is infused with a passion that calls to mind Michelangelo’s greatest works. The abrupt twist of the model’s head closely echoes the Italian master’s Dying Slave for the tomb of Julius II (c. 1510-13, Musée du Louvre). Watts had studied Michelangelo as a young man in Italy and felt strongly that the Renaissance had been neglected in England during the nineteenth century. In 1837, when Watts first started to exhibit, there was little published history of Italian Renaissance art in the English language beyond Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550-1568) and the National Gallery owned no fifteenth century Italian pictures and only a few sixteenth century works. By 1904, the National Gallery had become one of the greatest galleries of Renaissance paintings outside of Italy. This quantum leap was inspired by a number of different factors, including the taste of Sir Charles Eastlake, the availability of work for sale in Italy and the enthusiasm of the artists of the Victorian High Renaissance; G. F. Watts, Lord Leighton, Albert Moore and Sir Alfred Gilbert.

In the increasingly realistic and rationalistic age that rejected supernatural explanations of the world, mythological subjects also became an important part in the subject matter of the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates. Burne-Jones explained The more materialist science becomes, the more angels shall I paint; their wings are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul. The Pre-Raphaelite connection with Clytie becomes more apparent when it is considered that Watt’s painting, Clytie (1869, Watts Gallery) was bought by the important Pre-Raphaelite patron, William Graham. The subject of Clytie may represent a similar reaction by Watts against contemporary ideas on evolution and the cycles of life, following the publishing of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859. Clytie, in her transformation by the gods, retains something of her human spirit and sensibility by constantly turning towards the sun. Darwinism, on the other hand, promotes a blind struggle for survival, uninspired by any divine purpose.

The 1860s mark the beginning of Watts’s serious activity as a sculptor. In 1864, he exhibited A Design for Sculpture, Time and Oblivion to be Executed in Diverse Materials After the Manner of Phidias at the Royal Academy and received the first of several commissions for tomb sculptures. In 1867, he found it necessary to build a dedicated sculpture studio and around this time mentions in his correspondence his hopes to create sculpture on a large scale. In reference to Clytie, Watts wrote in a letter to William Gladstone: I much desire the good opinion of my bust and must explain that my aim in this first essay has been to get flexibility, impression of colour and largeness of character, rather than purity and gravity – qualities I own to be extremely necessary to sculpture, but which, being made, as it seems to me, exclusively the objects of the modern sculptor, have deadened his senses to some other qualities making part - often glories – of ancient art, and this has resulted in bare and cold work.

According to his second wife, Mary, Watts drew from several models for the bust. They included ‘Long Mary’, his favourite model of the 1860s, a housemaid at Little Holland House and Angelo Colorossi, the Italian who posed for Leighton for his powerful sculpture, Athlete Struggling with a Python. It was also recorded that a beautiful little child, not yet three years old – Margaret Burne-Jones – was laid under contribution and was studied in her mother’s arms.

It is not clear exactly when Watts began Clytie, however he implies in a letter to Mrs. Percy Wyndham dated January 29, 1868 that he had been working on the marble for some time. He first began modelling the figure in clay, most likely, in the previous summer. The unfinished marble version was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1868 and Mrs Barrington describes him working on it well into the 1870s. The marble version now belongs to the Guildhall Art Gallery, London and the two bronze casts made from the clay model belong respectively to Tate Britain and the Watts Gallery. There were also a small number of plaster versions, one of which belonged to George Eliot and at least two terracotta versions made by Mary Watts's pottery. At the 1868 Academy exhibition, Algernon Swinburne eulogised:

Not imitative, nor even assimilative of Michael Angelo’s manner, it yet by some vague and ineffable quality brings to mind his work rather than any Greek sculptor’s. There is the same intense and fiery sentiment, the same grandeur of device, the same mystery of tragedy. The colour and passion of this work are the workman’s own. Never was a divine legend translated into diviner likeness…