Date: 1887
Technique: Oil on canvas, 45.7 x 71.1 cm
Showing posts with label George Frederic Watts (1817-1904). Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Frederic Watts (1817-1904). Show all posts
5/5/19
George Frederic Watts, A Sea Ghost
Date: 1887
Technique: Oil on canvas, 45.7 x 71.1 cm
7/30/15
George Frederic Watts, The Messenger
Date: c.1884–85
Technique: Oil on canvas, 2743 x 1505 mm
The Messenger, also known as 'The Message of Peace' and 'The Messenger of Death', is one of a series of compositions by Watts that engage with the theme of death.
6/29/14
George Frederic Watts, Chaos
Date: c.1875–82
Technique: Oil on canvas, 1067 x 3048 mm
9/1/11
George Frederic Watts, Can These Bones Live?
Date: 1897-98
The Belgian Symboilst painter Fernand Khnopff knew Watts’s work well and favourably reviewed this work. Even though the title is taken from a passage in the Bible, Watts work intended it to be a withering attack on his country. “The bones in the painting”, he said to a visitor to his studio, “refer to the state of the nation”. At the heart of this dark picture is a fallen oak tree that crushes a skeleton, and lying around are various symbols to emphasise the point, including an assassin’s knife, a champagne glass and horses hooves filled with dice. According to the original architect of the Watts Gallery Christopher Hatton Turnor, Watts “persistently wore a black band on his arm. After a time I asked him who he was in mourning for? – no-one – ‘I mourn for the stupidity of my country.’”
Source
5/17/11
George Frederic Watts, She Shall be Called Woman
Tate Gallery, London
Date: c. 1875-92
Technique: Oil on canvas, 2578 x 1168 mm
In 1892 Watts embarked on The Eve Trilogy. The pictures were conceived as part of his ambitious allegorical project The House of Life which was to illustrate the history of the human race. This painting is the first of the trilogy in which Watts set out to show 'the three stages through which human life has to pass. In the first, the newly created soul is more conscious of heaven than of earth ... the hands grasp nothing of earth's treasures ... In the second, Eve Tempted, ... the sway of the senses has descended upon the soul.' The last work in the series Eve Repentant symbolizes how 'the earthly paradise is wrecked'.
Source 1
Source 2
Source 3
3/1/11
George Frederic Watts, The Dweller in the Innermost
Tate Gallery, London
Date: c. 1885-6
Technique: Oil on canvas, 1060 x 698 mm
Watts first called this painting The Soul’s Prism; the title only took its final form in 1893. A winged female figure gazes intently out of the picture through an atmospheric mandorla of iridescent orange light. Her forehead is crowned with a brilliant white star nestling at the centre of two red wings.
In the catalogue to the 1896 retrospective of his work, Watts suggested that this ethereal figure ‘may be vaguely called conscience... on her lap lie the arrows that pierce through all disguise, and the trumpet which proclaims truth to the world’.
Source
2/8/11
George Frederic Watts and assistants, The Court of Death
Tate Gallery, London
Date: c. 1870-1902
Technique: Oil on canvas, 4242 x 2743 mm
This painting was intended for the chapel of a paupers’ cemetery. Death is shown as an enthroned angel, holding a baby which shows, according to Watts, that ‘even the germ of life is in the lap of Death’. Flanking Death are allegorical figures of Silence and Mystery, guarding what lies beyond the veil: sunrise and the star of hope.
In the foreground a warrior surrenders his sword and a duke his coronet, showing that worldly status offers no protection. But Death also offers refuge: a man with crutches finds relief from pain, while a pale, sick woman rests her head.
Source
George Frederic Watts, Jonah
Tate Gallery, London
Date: 1894
Technique: Oil on canvas, 1555 x 914 mm
In this dramatic image Watts presents the gaunt Old Testament prophet Jonah warning the Ninevites to repent of their behaviour. The sins he denounces are shown in three parallel friezes, based on sculptures from the walls of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace: gambling, drunkenness, and greed – indicated by a group of figures crawling up to the money bags scattered on the floor.
Source 1
Source 2
George Frederic Watts, Mammon: Dedicated to his Worshippers
Tate Gallery, London
Date: 1884-85
Technique: Oil on canvas 182.9 x 106 cm
Watts painted Mammon as an entirely new subject for his own collection. It sums up many of his concerns at this stage in his career. With forthright clarity, its indisputable message cannot be denied and is enhanced by the nearly life-size scale of the work. The word 'Mammon', in origin Aramaic for riches, can be defined as wealth elevated to the position of an idol, amounting to an evil influence. In medieval times, the word was used as the proper name for the demon of covetousness. Throughout Watts's own writings, one finds many of the ideas which fed into Mammon. In 1880, Watts wrote in his article 'The Present Conditions of Art' (see p.72) about contemporary life: 'Modern habits of investigation have sapped unquestioning faith, and have not supplied anything more consoling. Material prosperity has become our real god, but we are surprised to find that the worship of this visible deity does not make us happy' (reprinted in Watts 1912, III, p.166). Mammon follows a few years after these remarks as a visualisation of Watts's firmly held belief in the evil of accruing money for its own sake.
Mammon is enthroned, like an ancient king, but further consideration reveals his grotesque physical appearance and his heartless cruelty. He crushes a youth under one foot; while a beautiful girl collapses under his massive fist. These figures, clearly emblematic of youth, innocence and beauty, appear lifeless and inert. Mammon, colossal in scale by comparison, sits in full glory with his 'gorgeous but ill-fitting golden draperies, which fall awkwardly about his coarse limbs' (Spielmann 1886, p.21). Moneybags fill his ample lap. In the oil study (Watts Gallery, Compton), Mammon is also characterised by his bandaged, gouty foot, another sign of his indulgence in luxuries, and further transforming him into a malformed monster.
Watts consciously manipulated art-historical conventions to heighten the impact of the picture. The format, with a nearly full-scale figure seated against a curtained background, calls to mind the tradition of the grand manner portrait, chiefly associated with masters of this genre in the late eighteenth century. In the case of Mammon, expectations are confounded: instead of an established worthy or famous beauty, the artist instead presents an object of disgust and horror seated on a throne decorated with skulls. The glimpse behind the curtained background reveals not a peaceful landscape garden or estate, but a view of fire and destruction.
Mammon's headgear is a clear reference to the 'Midas-eared Mammonism' excoriated by Carlyle in Past and Present (see p.29). It consists of a crown circled with upended gold coins, with ass's ears affixed to each side. It carries several iconographic meanings of its own, usually referring to ignorance and stupidity. Ovid's Metamorphoses told the story of King Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold, to whom Apollo gave ass's ears because he did not respond the music of the lyre. A link with Midas underlined Watts's message about the evils of wealth. There was also a saying current in the nineteenth century, 'King Death hath asses' ears', from Death's Jest Book of 1850 by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, which also relates to and enhances the meaning of Mammon.
The best-known reference to Mammon in literature appeared in Spenser's Faerie Queene, book II, canto 7, when Sir Guyon discovers the cave of Mammon, the treasure-house, or 'house of Richesse', of the god of wealth. Watts had frequently turned to Spenser's work, as, for example, in the various versions of Britomart. Spenser's lines characterise Mammon as bearing long claw-like nails and as tanned by soot from the blacksmith's forge, a detail one can link with the smoke in the Watts's painting. In his lap, Mammon carried a mass of gold coins and around him were great heaps of gold with which he tried to tempt the good knight.
The subtitle of the painting - Dedicated to his Worshippers - suggests other meanings for the work. Mrs Watts recorded that the artist would often preach against Mammon-worship, once saying 'Holy Mammon - Divine Respectability - Sacred Dividend'. He told the artist Briton Rivière, a good friend, that 'he was going to propose to one of our sculptors to make a statue of Mammon, that it might be set up in Hyde Park, where he hoped his worshippers would be at least honest enough to bow the knee publicly to him' (Watts 1912, II, p.149). As a sculptor himself, Watts may well have intended carrying out this idea; indeed the subtitle to the painting is like an inscription on a monument. A public monument would have had the advantage of being seen by an audience even wider than those attending fine art exhibitions.
In 1889, Mammon appeared as part of a group of nine works sent to the Universal Exhibition and of all of these works, including Hope, The Judgement of Paris and Love and Life, Mammon presented the most disturbing vision. Recalling that Sizeranne identified the exhibition of 1889 as a defining moment when the Symbolists seized upon the works of Watts and Burne-Jones (see pp.76-7), it must surely have been the imagery of cruelty, destruction and evil in Mammon that appealed to the more extreme members of French decadent circles.
Barbara Bryant
Source
12/14/10
George Frederic Watts, Time, Death and Judgement
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Date: c. 1865-1886
Technique: Oil on canvas, 243.8 x 166.4 cm
This painting was among the first gifts to the National Gallery of Canada, donated by the artist in 1887. It represents Watts' most ambitious contribution to his "House of Life" series of allegorical paintings that sought to record the symbolic history of mankind. The appearance of the youthful figure of Time on the left and the heavy drapery of Death on the right are influenced by classical sculpture. Above them hovers the figure of Judgement, holding a set of scales.
Source
12/7/10
George Frederic Watts, Hope
Tate Gallery, London
Date: 1886
Technique: Oil on canvas, 1422 x 1118 mm
In the Bible (Hebrews, 6:19), hope is ‘an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.’ Here, Hope is blindfolded, seated on a globe and playing a lyre of which all but one of the strings are broken. Watts wanted to find an original approach to allegory on universal themes. But Hope’s attempts to make music appear futile and several critics argued that the work might have been more appropriately titled Despair. Watts explained that ‘Hope need not mean expectancy. It suggests here rather the music which can come from the remaining chord’.
Source
12/6/10
George Frederic Watts, The Minotaur
Tate Gallery, London
Date: 1885
Technique: Oil on canvas, 1181 x 945 mm
In Greek mythology the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, was appeased by the annual sacrifice of virgins brought from mainland Athens to Crete. Watts shows the creature gazing out to sea in eager anticipation of his prey; the small bird crushed by his mighty fist symbolises the purity and vulnerability of youth.
The painting was inspired by a lurid exposure of the traffic in child prostitution by a journalist named WT Stead. The article, called ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ and published in the Pall Mall Gazette in July 1885, was intended as an indictment of male lust.
Source
10/7/10
George Frederic Watts, Death Crowning Innocence
Tate Gallery, London
Date: 1886-7; presented by the artist 1897
Technique: Oil on canvas, 1283 x 800 mm
This painting, in some ways a representative Victorian work, must be seen in the context of thse high infant and child mortality of the period. Like George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind, Charles Kingsley's Water Babies, and Holman Hunt's The Triumph of the Innocents, it offers comfort and reassurance to both parents and children.
Source
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)