George Frederic Watts was born in London in 1817. His first surviving picture is dated three years before Queen Victoria came to the throne; he was working on his last painting three years after her death. As well as being one of the leading portraitists of the Victorian age, Watts left behind a body of symbolist work that addresses (among other subjects) the Victorian loss of faith, child prostitution, and cruelty to animals. Like John Ruskin and William Morris, he saw art as a means to social reform.
For most of us, I think, this has made Watts's art harder, not easier, to appreciate. It encourages a tendency to treat each painting not as an end in itself but as a portal onto the age in which he lived.
This approach is not in itself wrong - indeed it is one important way in which his art differs from that of contemporaries such as Burne-Jones, Frith or Leighton. But what gets lost is our sense of Watts as an artist whose pictures we judge as we do those of any other artist: the handling of paint, the strength of the draughtsmanship, the originality of the conception, and the power of the composition.
The first picture in the show is his self-portrait at the age of 17. It shows a preternaturally sensitive youth whose tousled hair and bohemian dress belong to an already-bygone era of romantic poets doomed to die young.
The young Watts painted hopeless loves, dark deeds, noble knights and glamorous villains in pictures and sketches of remarkable technical confidence. In his self-portrait he uses paint with a freedom and fluidity that in one so young might almost be called arrogance.
After five years in Italy, Watts returned to London in 1847. Shocked by the extremes of wealth and poverty that he saw all around him, his pictures changed dramatically. Found Drowned shows the corpse of a young servant girl washed up under Waterloo Bridge; Under the Dry Arch depicts the slumped figure of an exhausted female vagrant sheltering beneath Blackfriars Bridge. In both pictures, nocturnal London itself becomes part of the story, the indifferent maw that swallows up these two anonymous lives.
The realism here is confrontational. Bravura brushwork is suppressed and the colours restricted to midnight blues, blacks and ochre, the better to focus the viewer's attention on single monumental figures isolated against the brooding skyline. Such images have no counterpart anywhere in art at this date.
Watts didn't show his realist paintings publicly for another 30 years and never attempted to sell them. He understood that the Victorian public would not tolerate - and certainly would not hang on their walls - works that told such brutal truths about the society they lived in.
But what the public would look at, and even buy, were pictures that told the same truths through myth and symbol. And so, in responding to the topical issue of child prostitution, Watts didn't show a little girl soliciting in the street. Instead, he painted the minotaur, the monstrous hybrid of man and bull, a symbol of rapacious male lust looking down from his fortress to find his next victim.
Such works reflect the anxieties and aspirations of the age. And yet I sometimes think that their symbolic content deflects our attention from the real issue, which is that at his best Watts is a sublimely beautiful painter who had his own original take on even the most time-worn subjects.
One of the most beautiful - and ghastly - pictures in this show, for example, is his Paolo and Francesca. In Dante's story, the adulterous lovers, murdered by Francesca's husband before they can repent their sin, are condemned to the circle of hell where souls are blown forever in a whirlwind. Watts goes out of his way to show the pair as beautiful corpses still wrapped in their shrouds, clinging together as they are swept through a black abyss.
And what could be more poetic than Watts's Endymion, where the blurred softness of silver-blue paint conjures up the vague idea of the goddess Diana in the form of diaphanous moonlight enfolding the sleeping youth?
Once you see how beautiful a painter Watts can be, you look at even the most rhetorical symbolist and allegorical pictures in a different way. For me, the horseman seen in an aureole of orange light in Watts's allegory Progress looks like the logo of a power company. But look at the freely-painted robes of the miser who counts his gold in the lower foreground, and you will see a passage so sensuously painted it reminds you of Titian.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3563601/GF-Watts-confronting-the-demons-of-his-age.html
At present there is a minor exhibition on by Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, and her pretty painting and book illustrations were the Pre-Raphaelites' last hoorah - she used delicious colours like early Millais. I have enlarged this but it is painted in with careful detail and is much longer than this.
