“FOR HE HAD GREAT POSSESSIONS.”
much about him that is precise and courtly, and which, as I shall have occasion to remark, belongs really to a yet older period. But it is more right to reckon Watts along with them in their genuine raggedness than to suppose that the unquestionable picturesqueness with which he fronts the world has any relation with that new Bohemianism which is untidy because it is conventional, frank because it follows a fashion, careless because it watches for all its effects, and ragged and coarse in its tastes because it has too much money.
The first definite encouragement, or at least the first encouragement now ascertainable, probably came to the painter from that interesting Greek amateur, Mr. Constantine Ionides. It was under his encouragement that Watts began all his earlier work of the more ambitious kind, and it was the portrait of Mrs. Constantine Ionides which ranks among the earliest of his definite successes. He achieved immediate professional success, however, at an astonishingly early age, judged by modern standards. When he was barely twenty he had three pictures in the Royal Academy: the first two were portraits, and the third a picture called The Wounded Heron. There is always a very considerable temptation to fantasticality in dealing with these artistic origins: no doubt it does not always follow that a man is destined to be a military conqueror because he beats other little boys at school, nor endued with a passionate and clamorous nature because he begins this mortal life with a yell. But Watts has, to a rather unusual degree, a sincere and consistent and homogeneous nature; and this first exhibit of his has really a certain amount of symbolism about it. Portraiture, with which he thus began, he was destined to raise to a level never before attained in English art, so far as significance and humanity are concerned; and there is really something a little fascinating about the fact that along with these pictures went one picture which had, for all practical purposes, an avowedly humanitarian object. The picture of The Wounded Heron scarcely ever attracts attention, I imagine, in these days, but it may, of course, have been recalled for a moment to the popular mind by that curious incident which occurred in connexion with it and which has often been told. Long after the painter who produced that picture in his struggling boyhood had lost sight of it and in all probability forgotten all about its existence, a chance traveller with a taste in the arts happened to find it in the dusty curiosity-shop of a north-country town. He bought it and gave it back to the now celebrated painter, who hung it among the exhibits at Little Holland House. It is, as I have said, a thing painted clearly with a humanitarian object: it depicts the suffering of a stricken creature; it depicts the helplessness of life under the cruelty of the inanimate violence; it depicts the pathos of dying and the greater pathos of living. Since then, no doubt, Watts has improved his machinery of presentation and found larger and more awful things to tell his tale with than a bleeding bird. The wings of the heron have widened till they embrace the world with the terrible wings of Time or Death: he has summoned the stars to help him and sent the angels as his ambassadors. He has changed the plan of operations until it includes Heaven and Tartarus. He has never changed the theme.
The relations of Watts to Constantine Ionides either arose or became important about this time. The painter’s fortunes rose quickly and steadily, so far as the Academy was concerned. He continued to exhibit with a fair amount of regularity, chiefly in the form of subjects from the great romantic or
AN IDLE CHILD OF FANCY.
historic traditions which were then the whole pabulum of the young idealistic artist. In the Academy of 1840 came a picture on the old romantic subject of Ferdinand and Isabella; in the following year but one, a picture on the old romantic subject of Cymbeline. The portrait of Mrs. Constantine Ionides appeared in 1842.
But Watts’ mode of thought from the very beginning had very little kinship with the Academy and very little kinship with this kind of private and conventional art. An event was shortly to occur, the first success of his life, but an event far less important when considered as the first success of his life than it is when considered as an essential characteristic of his mind. The circumstances are so extremely characteristic of something in the whole spirit of the man’s art that it may be permissible to dwell at length on the significance of the fact rather than on the fact itself.