A portrait of Lord Tennyson is among his latest work. During one of the sittings, Tennyson said to Watts:
“If John Keats had lived he would have been the greatest of the English poets.”
Watts’ very latest portrait of Walter Crane is in his most vigorous manner. It is painted in soft tones, face, coat, hair, background, all a mellow range of browns. The expression is characteristic, a really superb portrait. It reminded me of the day when Crane lunched with us in Beacon Street, and I tried to dissuade him from going to speak at an anarchistic sort of a meeting at Boston Music Hall.
“As I do not sell my pictures,” Watts said, “I feel that I have the right to carry out an idea in many ways.”
This a propos of a subject he has treated several times, the “Angel of Death.”
“Too much gloom and terror is associated with death,” he said. “It is sad to lose our dear ones, but beyond that death is not to be feared.” He pointed to a picture he calls “The Messenger.”
“I wish that picture to be understood by all people, not merely by Christians. The picture should tell its story to the Jew or the Mohammedan equally well.”
The Messenger is a queenly figure, slow and stately, advancing towards a dying woman on a couch. “The Court of Death”, an enormous canvas just sketched in, is fine in composition and thought. Death, the same majestic figure, sits enthroned; below her is an altar. In the foreground a cripple brings his crutch to lay upon the shrine, a king casts his crown upon it. A soldier, a superb figure of a man standing with his back towards the spectator, throws down his sword. A girl sits at Death’s feet; the drapery of the seated figure flows into a winding sheet about her. In the lap of Death lies a young child, suggesting the new birth into the other life. Behind on either side stands a tall angel guarding the door that opens into the mystery beyond.
“Too many young men and women are taking up art as a career to-day,” Watts declared. “Any boy who has a little facility with brush or pencil is praised and petted into believing he is an artist. An artist must dress well and must appear as a gentleman should. If he has a wife and children, he must have a comfortable house for them. Many of them would starve to death were it not for the immense number of illustrations needed to-day for books.”
In answer to a question of J.’s about his methods of work, Watts said: