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- Herausgeber: Publisher s13381
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
George Frederic Watts, RA (1817 – 1904) was an English Victorian painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. He said "I paint ideas, not things." Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical works, such as Hope and Love and Life. These paintings were intended to form part of an epic symbolic cycle called the "House of Life", in which the emotions and aspirations of life would all be represented in a universal symbolic language.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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George Frederic Watts
Selected Paintings
By Leonard Brasini
––––––––
First Edition
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Copyright © 2017 by Leonard Brasini
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Foreword
Paintings
Foreword
George Frederic Watts, RA (1817 – 1904) was an English Victorian painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. He said "I paint ideas, not things." Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical works, such as Hope and Love and Life. These paintings were intended to form part of an epic symbolic cycle called the "House of Life", in which the emotions and aspirations of life would all be represented in a universal symbolic language.
Watts showed artistic promise very early, learning sculpture from the age of 10 with William Behnes, starting to devotedly study the Elgin Marbles and then enrolling as a student at the Royal Academy at the age of 18. He first exhibited at the Academy in 1837. He also began his portraiture career, receiving patronage from his close contemporary Alexander Constantine Ionides, who later came to be a close friend.
He came to the public eye with a drawing entitled Caractacus, which was entered for a competition to design murals for the new Houses of Parliament at Westminster in 1843.
The prize from the Westminster competition did, however, fund a long visit to Italy from 1843 onwards, where Watts stayed and became friends with the British ambassador Henry Fox, 4th Baron Holland and his wife Augusta at their homes in Casa Feroni and the Villa Careggi. Also while in Italy Watts began producing landscapes and was inspired by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel. Leaving Florence in April 1847 for what was intended to be a brief return to London, he ended up staying. One of only two pupils Watts ever accepted was Henry's son Valentine Cameron Prinsep; the other was John Roddam Spencer Stanhope – both remained friends, but neither became a major artist. While living as tenant at Little Holland House, Watts's epic paintings were exhibited in Whitechapel by his friend the social reformer Canon Samuel Barnett, and he finally received a commission for the Houses of Parliament, completing his The Triumph of the Red Cross Knight in 1852–53. He also took a short trip back to Italy in 1853 and with Charles Thomas Newton to excavate Halicarnassus in 1856–57, via Constantinople and the Greek islands.
In the 1860s, Watts' work shows the influence of Rossetti, often emphasising sensuous pleasure and rich colour. Among these paintings is a portrait of his young wife, the actress Ellen Terry, who was 30 years his junior. When she eloped with another man after less than a year of marriage, Watts was obliged to divorce her. Watts's association with Rossetti and the Aesthetic movement altered during the 1870s, as his work increasingly combined Classical traditions with a deliberately agitated and troubled surface, to suggest the dynamic energies of life and evolution, as well as the tentative and transitory qualities of life. These works formed part of a revised version of the House of Life, influenced by the ideas of Max Müller, the founder of comparative religion. Watts hoped to trace the evolving "mythologies of the races" in a grand synthesis of spiritual ideas with modern science, especially Darwinian evolution.
In 1886, at the age of 69, Watts remarried, to Mary Fraser Tytler, a Scottish designer and potter, then aged 36. Refusing the baronetcy twice offered him by Queen Victoria, he was elected as an Academician to the Royal Academy in 1867 and accepted to be one of the original members of the new Order of Merit (OM) in 1902 – in his own words, on behalf of all English artists.
