L’Art.
WATTS.   ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE.
(By permission of the Artist.)

As a landscape painter Watts is a visionary like Turner, though in addition to the purely artistic effect of his pictures he always endeavoured to awaken remoter feelings and ideas of some kind or another. His landscape “Corsica” reveals a grey expanse, with very slight vibrations of tone which suggest that out to sea a distant island is emerging from the mist. His “Mount Ararat,” a picture entirely filled with the play of light blue tones, represents a number of barren rocky cones bathed in the intense blue of a pure transparent starry night. Above the highest peak there is one star sparkling more brilliantly than the others. In his “Deluge: the Forty-first Day,” he attempted to depict, after an interpretation of his own, the power “with which light and heat, dissipating the darkness and dissolving the multitude of the waters into mist and vapour, give new life to perished nature.” What is actually placed before the eye is a delicate symphony of colours which would have delighted Turner: wild, agitated sea, clouds gleaming like liquid gold, and mist behind which the sun rises in a magical glow, like a red ball of fire.

In his portraits he is earnest and sincere. Just as fifty years ago David d’Angers devoted half a lifetime to getting together a portrait gallery of famous contemporaries, so to Watts belongs the glory of having really been the historian of his time. The collection of portraits, many of which are to be seen in the National Portrait Gallery, comprises about forty likenesses, all of them half-length pictures, all of them upon the same scale of size, all of them representing very famous men. Amongst the poets comprised in this gallery of genius are Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, William Morris, and Sir Henry Taylor; amongst prose-writers, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Lecky, Motley, and Leslie Stephen; amongst statesmen, Gladstone, Sir Charles Dilke, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Salisbury, Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Lyndhurst, and Lord Sherbrooke; amongst the leaders of the clergy, Dean Stanley, Dean Milman, Cardinal Manning, and Dr. Martineau; amongst painters, Rossetti, Millais, Leighton, Burne-Jones, and Calderon; and amongst notable foreigners, Guizot, Thiers, Joachim the violinist, and many others. In the matter of technique Watts is excelled by many of the French. His portraits have something heavy, nor are they eminent either for softness of modelling, or for that momentary and animated effect peculiar to Lenbach. But few portraits belonging to the nineteenth century have the same force of expression, the same straightforward sureness of aim, the same grandeur and simplicity. Before each of the persons represented one is able to say, That is a painter, that a poet, and that a scholar. All the self-conscious dignity of a President of the Royal Academy is expressed in the picture of Leighton, and his look is as cold as marble; while the eyes of Burne-Jones seem mystically veiled, as though they were gazing into the past. Indeed, the way in which Watts grasps his characters is masterly beyond conception. Amongst the old painters Tintoretto and Moroni might be compared with him most readily, while Van Dyck is the least like him of all.

In opposition to the poetic fantasy of Burne-Jones dallying with legendary lore, an element of brooding thought is characteristic of the large compositions of Watts, a meditative absorption in ideas which provoke the intellect to further activity by their mysterious allegorical suggestions. Just as he makes an approach to the old Venetians in external form, he is divided from them in the inward burden of his work by a severity and hardiness characteristic of the Northern spirit, a predominance of idea seldom met with amongst Southern masters, and a profoundly sad way of thought in which one sees the stamp of the nineteenth century. Apart from the purely artistic effect of his work, he tried to make his pictures serve as a stimulus to deeper thought and meditation: “The end of art,” he writes, “must be the exposition of some weighty principle of spiritual significance, the illustration of a great truth.”

“The Spirit of Christianity,” the only one of his works which has a religious tone, displays a youth throned upon the clouds, with children nestling at his feet. His powerful head is bent upwards, and his right hand opened wide. In “Orpheus and Eurydice” he has chosen the moment when Orpheus turns round to behold Eurydice turning pale and sinking to the earth, to be once more swallowed by Hades. The lyre drops from his hands, and with a gesture of despair he draws the form of his wife to his heart in a last, eternal embrace. “Artemis and Endymion” is a scene in which a tall female figure in silvery shining vesture bends over the sleeping shepherd, throwing herself into the curve of a sickle.

But, as a rule, he neither makes use of Christian nor of ancient ideas, but embodies his own thoughts. In “The Illusions of Life,” a picture belonging to the year 1847, beautiful, dreamy figures hover over a gulf, spreading at the verge of existence. At their feet lie the shattered emblems of greatness and power, and upon a small strip of the earth hanging over an abyss those illusions are visible which have not yet been destroyed: Glory, in the shape of a knight in harness, chases the bubble of resounding fame; Love is symbolised by a pair who are tenderly embracing; Learning, by an old man poring over manuscripts in the dusk; Innocence, by a child grasping at a butterfly. “The Angel of Death” is a picture of a winged and mighty woman throned at the entrance of a way which leads to eternity. Upon her knees there rests, covered with a white cloth, the corpse of a new-born child. Men and women of every station lay reverently down at the feet of the angel the symbols of their dignity and the implements of their earthly toil.

WATTS.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
ARTEMIS AND ENDYMION.
(By permission of Mr. Robert Dunthorne, the owner of the copyright.)

“Love and Death” represents the two great sovereigns of the world wrestling together for a human life. With steps which have a mysterious majesty, pallid Death draws near, demanding entrance at the door of a house, whilst Love, a slight, boyish figure with bright wings, places himself in the way; but with one great, irresistible gesture the mighty genius of Death sweeps the shrinking child to one side. In another picture, “Love and Life,” the genius of Love, in the form of a slim, powerful youth, helps poor, weak, clinging Life, a half-grown, timid, faltering girl, to clamber up the stony path of a mountain, over which the sun rises golden. “Hope” is a picture in which a tender spirit, bathed in the blue mist, sits upon the globe, blindfold, listening in bliss to the low sound vibrating from the last string of her harp. “Mammon” is embodied by Watts in a coarse and bloated satyr brutally setting his heel upon a youth and a young girl, as upon a footstool.

In 1893, when the committee of the Munich Exhibition were moved by the writings of Cornelius Gurlitt to have some of these works sent over to Germany, a certain disappointment was felt in artistic circles. And any one who is accustomed to gauge pictures by their technique is justified in missing the genuine pictorial temperament in Watts. The sobriety of his scheme of colour, his preference for subdued tones, his distaste for all “dexterity” and freedom from all calculated refinement, are not in accord with the desires of our time. Even his sentiment is altogether opposed to that which predominates in the other New Idealists. Burne-Jones and Rossetti found sympathy because their repining lyricism, their psychopathic subtlety, their wonderful mixture of archaic simplicity and décadent hautgoût, stand in direct touch with the present. Watts’ pictures seem cold and wanting in temperament because he made no appeal to the vibrating life of the nerves.