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  • G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary: Highlights from the Watts Gallery Collection
  • Andrea Wolk Rager (bio)
G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary: Highlights from the Watts Gallery Collection, by Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant; pp. xiii + 310. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, in association with Watts Gallery, 2008, $75.00, £40.00.

Prior to its restoration, Watts Gallery in rural Compton, Surrey, stood as an apt testament to the eponymous artist’s public and scholarly reputation: idiosyncratic, remote, and seemingly on the verge of collapse, yet still oddly captivating, enduring through desuetude to inspire pilgrimages of the devout, while consistently winning over new [End Page 478] converts who happened to stumble upon it. In 2004, however, the fortunes of both the artist, George Frederic Watts (1817–1904), and his purpose-built gallery, began to shift. In commemoration of the centenary of Watts’s death, several prominent institutions sought to illuminate the work of this marginalized Victorian painter and sculptor by hosting simultaneous exhibitions dedicated to his work, most notably G. F. Watts Portraits: Fame & Beauty in Victorian Society, curated by Barbara Bryant and held at the National Portrait Gallery, London (accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalog of the same title); a collection display at Tate Britain titled “The Symbolic Paintings of G. F. Watts,” curated by Alison Smith; and, finally, The Vision of G. F. Watts OM RA (1817–1904), held at the Watts Gallery and curated by Veronica Franklin Gould. It was also during this year that two substantial scholarly texts were published to coincide with the centenary, Gould’s exhaustive biography, G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian (2004) and Representations of G. F. Watts: Art Making in Victorian Culture (2004), a compilation of critical essays edited by Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown. In the wake of this renewed interest in the long-neglected artist, the derelict state of the devotedly administered but desperately underfunded Watts Gallery and the endangered status of its collections was dramatically exposed. Capitalizing on the resurgent enthusiasm for the artist, the Watts Gallery Hope Project was launched, ultimately succeeding in not only securing the necessary funds to restore the Arts and Crafts building, but also concurrently allowing for a newly conserved selection of works from the collection to travel, some for the first time in decades, outside of Surrey to London and Harrogate. The current volume under consideration, by Mark Bills and Bryant, and the exhibition it accompanied, arguably serve as the final puzzle piece in revitalizing interest in Watts. Replete with richly detailed, full-color illustrations and cogent, accessible essays and catalog entries, Victorian Visionary does much to bring the Watts Gallery’s highly personal collection before a wider public, overcoming the ineluctable geographical restrictions of this unique institution without disturbing the holistic encounter of the visitor as originally envisaged by the artist.

The catalog introduces Watts and his gallery through four essays. Beginning with “Watts Gallery: A Temple of Art in Rural England,” curator Bills appropriately launches the catalog with a comprehensive institutional history. Bills traces the early development of the gallery under the direct supervision of Watts in 1903 through the subsequent fate of the gallery during the ebb of the artist’s critical reception in the mid-twentieth century. Bills provides insight into the artist’s motivations for creating his own gallery, noting that Watts not only desired to structure his personal collection into coherent ideological groupings, but perhaps more importantly, he was also driven by “the question of preserving his own genius for perpetuity” (3). In “Invention and Reinvention: The Art and Life of G. F. Watts,” Bryant takes up the thread of Watts’s obsession with self-fashioning by tracing the course of the artist’s career through his own self-portraits, culminating with the adopted persona of “Signor,” a sage and semi-mystical figure in a Titian-esque red skullcap. Bryant’s contribution thus not only provides a biographical overview for the reader, but also delineates the framework of the exhibition and the accompanying catalog, which unfolds chronologically by decade. It must be noted, however, that although Victorian Visionary foregrounds Watts’s fixation with ensuring the perpetual sanctity of his public image, the text...

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