GEORGE FREDERIC WATTS OM RA HRCA (1817-1904) Biography
SYMBOLISTE (founded 1886)

Description / Expertise

This portrait was painted during what one critic describes as the supreme period of George Frederic Watts' portrait art. During the 1880's, Watts gained the reputation of England's painter-philosopher and exhibitions of his work were held both in England and America, including the winter exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1881-1882 and a major exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1884.

George Frederic Watts' portraits of this period were painted with the same sensitivity and strength of feeling which he later embodied in his symbolic works. Mary Watts explained that, the subject of this study was not a professional model, though the parents' temporary need of money… made him suggest that it would be helpful to him if the young lady would allow him to paint the unusually fine shade of red-auburn hair.
In 1886, Watts explained that, It is a mistake to consider that my portraiture is in the ordinary sense `ideal'; it is intended, on the contrary, to be very real and to make it so my endeavour is to paint the mental as well as the physical likeness. I always try, as the chief essential, to sink myself altogether in the portraits I paint…

George Frederic Watts became one of the most internationally revered artists in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. French and Belgian Symbolistes were deeply influenced by his intense and innovative vision, and in Britain his public status was, almost God-like. They referred to him and addressed him as “Signor”. His career as a painter and sculptor spanned Queen Victoria's long reign and his output changes stylistically throughout his career, ranging from late Regency portraits and Landseer-like animal studies to evocative and almost abstract symbolic subjects.

In 1843 he won a three hundred pound prize in the first Westminster Hall competition for the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament with Caractacus led in Triumph though the Streets of Rome (fragments in the Victoria and Albert Museum). This enabled him to travel to Italy where he remained until 1847. After his return he became the house guest of Mrs Prinsep (He came to stay three days, he stayed thirty years, she wrote) and encouraged her son Val to become an artist

In 1867 Watts was elected both Associate of the Royal Academy and Academician, but it was also a time of personal unhappiness. In 1864 he married the teenaged actress Ellen Terry, but they separated in less than a year. His second marriage, contracted in 1886 to a woman thirty-three years younger than he, was very successful. Macmillan published his wife's three-volume biography, Annals of an Artist's Life in 1912.

There is now a memorial museum of his work is at Compton near Guildford. A Selection of his work was exhibited in Victorian High Renaissance (City Art Gallery, Manchester, Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Brooklyn Museum, 1978-1979) and Wilfrid Blunt's biography, England's Michelangelo (1975), has recently been re-issued in paperback. In the exhibition at the Tate Gallery (1997-8), The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts, Symbolism in Britain, the power of his work could at last be reassessed.


Watts, R B D Sketchley, Methuen & co., p.46

Mary Watts, Catalogue of the Works of G F Watts, volume 1, page 141