Guildford Diary: Famous friends

As part of the Guildford Book Festival, Lynne Truss spoke last Saturday evening to an audience gathered in Watts Gallery – the spectacular space once owned by the Victorian artist G.F. Watts that now houses the largest collection of his works. Truss was discussing her novel, Tennyson’s Gift, which imagines what it could have been like to belong to Watts’s set at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight in the 1860s.

It’s difficult to know what to make of G.F. Watts. As an artist he was, indeed is, much admired. Hope: World Icon (1885-6), a delicate rendering of a blindfolded lyre-player probably remains his best-known work, prized across the generations for its enigmatic symbolic value. It was as a Symbolist that Watts made his mark, which perhaps helps to explain his universal appeal. A school child’s first encounter with Art History often involves gazing at paintings such as van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and deciphering their meaning out of carefully placed symbols – a loyal lapdog, a mirror, the choice of colours.