Hidden in plain sight

This painting was adopted by the African-American civil rights movement and influenced Barack Obama’s entry into politics. Few remember the artist – yet he was a Victorian superstar. Nicholas Tromans puts GF Watts back in the spotlight.

Who was the most famous living British painter around 1900? The answer is probably George Frederic Watts (1817–1904), the bicentenary of whose birth falls this year. Watts managed to impress the intelligentsia of his day, as well as succeeding in reaching, with his allegories of human progress, the non-gallery-going public – that demographic element which those who run museums today spend so much time worrying about.

When we speak of ‘his day’, however, that needs a little more precision. As a young man, Watts exhibited alongside Turner in London; towards the end of his life he was an influence upon the young Picasso. The artist’s career, given that he was already hard at work as a teenager, spanned some seven decades. But Watts’ name only became a household word from the 1880s onwards. In that decade there were a series of high-profile exhibitions – in Manchester, London and New York (the latter attracted over one million visitors) – which confirmed Watts in his position as a National Treasure. Watts, it seemed to the late Victorians, was an artist who had set himself the most demanding of tasks – to carve out a truly meaningful role for high art in the modern world.

Watts began by aspiring to emulate Michelangelo and the great artists of the Renaissance in undertaking vast murals and frescoes. Later he had turned inwards under the influence of the Aesthetic Movement of the 1860s. Turning his back too upon the market, upon fashion, upon Impressionism, Watts was authenticity personified. Nothing mattered except the lifelong search for the resonant image – the picture that would express the epic struggle of humanity to raise itself up from superstition, selfishness and ignorance. Placed against the self-satisfied and prettified products of most of the London art scene of this period, Watts really did seem to belong to another time and place, to be a great Old Master somehow transplanted to the smogs and entertainments of modern London.

As Watts evolved from outsider artist to saint of the art world at the end of the 19th century, his subject matter narrowed down to the key interests which had obsessed him since the 1840s. These were prophetic pictures warning of the sins to which people were still heirs in industrial and semi-democratic Britain. Mammon, for example (which some unkind spirits have suggested bears a resemblance to the current American president), is a personification of financial greed and the appalling damage to human life in which it results. The image, like so many of Watts’ major later statements, had a real impact beyond the galleries of the metropolis: it was adopted as a kind of coat of arms by William Morris’s Hammersmith Socialist Society.

Watts also continued, as he had always done, to paint portraits both of his friends and famous contemporaries (the two categories often overlapped), and devoted years to creating an extended sequence of male portraits for the National Portrait Gallery. Perhaps most originally, from an art-historical point of view, was Watts’ cosmic imagery, in which he sought to express a sense of the human spirit’s striving for betterment as an aspect of the unfolding of the universe. In this category fall works such as the familiar Hope, with its allegory of human blindness and resilience; and Physical Energy, the epic sculptural group of a horse and rider, which, with its craggy, lunar surface, was intended to represent mankind as itself a cosmic body.

By the time of his death in 1904, it is probably fair to say that Watts suffered from being too well supported. The National Portrait Gallery, the new Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum showed his work, and there were shelves of journalism vaunting his greatness. There was also his widow, the artist’s second wife Mary Watts, a distinguished designer in her own right, who maintained the role of keeper of the flame into the 1930s by which time, of course, anything Victorian had been decisively mothballed. The ambitious wall paintings created by Watts in the 1850s were now hard to get sight of, and the very basis of Watts’ approach to making art had been undermined. Modernism required art to be about itself, not reaching out to effect an immediate impact upon society, and it also rather preferred the middling sorts to keep their noses out of the arts. Connoisseurs and proletarians were fine, but Philistine England was not welcome. That I think is the key to understanding the precipitous fall from grace of Watts’ reputation. There were simply too many Middle Brows among Watts’ many fans, who perhaps saw in him reassuring continuity with the culture of the past, and for whom he played a rather overblown role as a maestro of his art – the Richard Clayderman of the Victorian art world, perhaps.

But that’s far from the whole story. To start with, there were some very serious art-critics, such as Roger Fry, who continued to insist, to a sceptical 20th-century readership, that Watts was a profound artist. His paintings could be seen in high-profile places such as the Palace of Westminster, St Paul’s Cathedral and the White House in Washington. And Watts’ art itself continued its extraordinary life beyond the now largely uninterested art scene. To take one dramatic example – Hope became attached, somehow, to the African-American civil rights movement. Martin Luther King preached a sermon on the picture, and years later another similar sermon helped turn Barack Obama from law to politics.

Meanwhile, in the Surrey Hills not far from Guildford, Mary Watts had gradually developed the home she had shared with Watts into an entire estate devoted to the principles of bringing art and craft into the lives of everyone – aesthete, stockbroker
or cowherd. Together they had designed a house, Limnerslease, completed in 1891. Mary then built the extraordinary Watts Chapel with local villagers and established the Compton Potters’ Arts Guild. Finally they built a hostel for the pottery workers that doubled as a gallery for Watts’ own work. Over the last decade, the Watts Gallery Trust has been working to restore the buildings, which are now open to the public as Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village. Here we have been celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Watts with a sequence of exhibitions and events.

Until November, visitors can explore all aspects of Watts’ prodigious output – his sculpture, murals, drawings and paintings. Our exhibition GF Watts: England’s Michelangelo, includes loans from the major national museums as well as from private collections. But as always, there is also much else to do. There is an extensive programme of activities and our famed tea shop.

GF Watts was more than an artist: he was a visionary, a prophet, a social reformer and a charismatic sage who loved the company of the glamorous and the talented. It is fitting that his legacy, at Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village, is equally much more than a picture gallery. 

GF Watts: England’s Michelangelo will be on show at Watts Gallery (Artists’ Village, Compton GU3 1DQ) until 26 November. wattsgallery.org

Image: GF Watts, Hope, 1886.