George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), if never exactly popular, was regarded in his day as possibly the greatest artist in the world. He was the first living artist to be accorded a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was esteemed in France as few British artists have been, before or since. He was one of the great portraitists of his age. Sadly, though, to a 21st-century audience he has all too little of the accessibility of his younger contemporaries, the Pre-Raphaelites, and until recently was the point at which even many lovers of Victorian painting drew the line.
He deplored the very idea of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ and regarded himself as an ethical teacher like his friends John Ruskin and Lord Tennyson. ‘Great Victorians’ like these have been little more than figures of fun for much of the last century.
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