Cameron, photo.
WATTS.   LOVE AND DEATH.
(By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the picture.)

Later he turned to decorative painting, like all the representatives of the pre-Raphaelite group. He is one of the most original designers for industrial work in tapestry, next to Morris the most influential leader of the English arts and crafts, and he has collaborated in founding that modern naturalistic tendency of style which will be the art of the future. His designs are always based upon naturalistic motives—the English type of womanhood and the English splendour of flowers. There always predominates a sensitive relationship between the æsthetic character of the forms and their symbolical significance. He always adapts an object of nature so that it may correspond in style with the material in which he works. The way in which he makes use of the noblest models of antiquity and of the Renaissance, and yet immediately transposes them into an English key of sentiment and into available modern forms, is entirely peculiar. And last, but not least, he is a marvellous illustrator. Every one went wild with delight at the close of the sixties over the appearance of his first children’s books, The Faerie Queene, The Little Pig who went to Market, and King Luckiboy, the pictures of which were soon displayed upon all patterns for embroidery. And they were followed by others: after 1875 he published Tell me a Story, The First of May—a Fairy Masque, The Sirens Three, Echoes of Hellas, and so forth. The two albums The Baby’s Bouquet and The Baby’s Opera of 1879 are probably the finest of them all.

In spite of their childish subjects, the drawings of Walter Crane have such a monumental air that they have the effect of “grand painting.” Without imitation he reproduces spontaneously the grace and character of the primitive Florentines. Some of his plates recall “The Dream of Polifilo,” and might bear the monogram of Giovanni Bellini. They owe their origin to a profound Germanic sentiment mingled with pagan reminiscences; they are an almost Grecian and yet English art, where fancy like a foolish, dreamy child plays with a brilliant skein of forms and colours.

That great artist George Frederick Watts stands quite apart as a personality in himself. In point of substance he is divided from others by not leaning upon poets, but by inventing independent allegories for himself; and in point of form by courting neither the Quattrocento nor the Roman Cinquecento, but rather following the Venice of the later Renaissance. Instead of the marble precision of Squarcione or Mantegna, what predominates in his work is something soft and melting, which might recall Correggio, Tintoretto, or Giorgione, were it not that there is a cooler grey, a subdued light fresco tone in Watts, in place of the Venetian glory of colour.

As a man, Watts was one of those artists who are only to be found in England—an artist who, from his youth upwards, has been able to live for his art without regard to profit. Born in London in the year 1820, he left the Academy after being a pupil there for a brief period, and began to visit the Elgin Room in the British Museum. The impression made upon him by the sculptures of the Parthenon was decisive for his whole life. Not merely are numerous plastic works due to his study of them, but several of his finest paintings. When he was seventeen he exhibited his first pictures, which were painted very delicately and with scrupulous pains; and in 1843 he took part in the competition for the frescoes of the Houses of Parliament, amongst which the representation of St. George and the Dragon was from his hand. With the proceeds of the prize which he received at the competition he went to Italy, and there he came to regard the great Venetians Titian and Giorgione as his kin and his contemporaries. The pupil of Phidias became the worshipper of Tintoretto. In Italy he produced “Fata Morgana,” a picture of a warrior vainly catching at the airy white veil of a nude female figure which floats past. This work already displays him as an accomplished artist, though it is wanting in the large, Classical tranquillity of his later paintings. He returned home with plans demanding more than human energy. Like the Frenchman Chenavard, he cherished the purpose of representing the history of the world in a series of frescoes, which were to adorn the walls of a building specially adapted for the purpose. “Chaos,” “The Creation,” “The Temptation of Man,” “The Penitence,” “The Death of Abel,” and “The Death of Cain” were the earliest pictures which he designed for the series. It was through fresco painting alone, as he believed, that it was possible to school English art to monumental grandeur, nobleness, and simplicity. But it was not possible for him to remain long upon this path in England, where painting has but little space accorded to it upon the walls of churches, while in other public buildings decoration is not in demand. Moreover, it is doubtful whether Watts would have achieved anything great in this province of art. At any rate, a work which he executed for the dining-hall at Lincoln’s Inn—an assembly of the lawgivers of all times from Moses down to Edward I—is scarcely more than a mixture of Raphael’s “School of Athens” and the “Hemicycle” of Delaroche. In magnificent allegories in the form of oil-paintings he first found the expression of his individuality. Like Turner, Watts did not paint pictures for sale. Yet he has lent one or other of his pictures to almost every public exhibition. A whole room is devoted to him in the Tate Gallery. But to know his work thoroughly one had to go to his house. His studio in Little Holland House contained almost all his important creations, and was visited by the public upon Saturday and Sunday afternoons as freely as if it were a museum.

WATTS.Pageant.
ARIADNE.
(By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright.)