A neglected Victorian

That eminent Victorian George Frederick Watts — Strachey thought of including him in his seminal study but was sadly deflected — is at last undergoing something of a revival. In his lifetime one of the most famous of contemporary painters (though his works never sold for quite the vast sums realised by Millais or Burne-Jones), Watts has been neglected. His ambition was to be a history painter, and he spent much of his long life and considerable energies on allegorical pictures, which today find little favour. His portraits, which he often used as a means of subsidising his less popular High Art compositions, are recognised as supreme examples of the art, and were given a comprehensive showing at the National Portrait Gallery in 2004.

His second wife built a museum to his work, near Guildford in the leafy Surrey village of Compton, and this is now urgently in need of restoration. Part of the scheme to raise awareness of its plight is a splendid display of Watts’s landscape paintings, a little-known aspect of his oeuvre. Previously shown in June at the supportive St James’s dealership of Nevill Keating, this exhibition is the first devoted to his landscapes to be mounted anywhere in the world.

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Watts (1817–1904) was the son of an impoverished Hereford piano-maker, and was largely self-taught. In 1843 he won a prize to decorate with history paintings the new Houses of Parliament, and travelled to Italy on the prize money. He studied fresco there and absorbed the classical approach to landscape painting, which was to influence all his subsequent explorations in that genre. No parliamentary commission emerged from Watts’s proposals though he won first prize in a second competition. He became known instead as a portrait painter until his allegories were shown in the early 1880s, when they began to exert a tenacious hold on the popular imagination.