Representations of G. F. Watts: Art Making in Victorian Culture (review)

Artist centenaries exercise an ever greater influence on the direction of scholarship. What the 1996 Frederic Leighton retrospective at the Royal Academy did for its former president, so 2004 has accomplished for Leighton's academically wayward friend, George Frederic Watts. This centenary produced exhibition catalogues for Watts's portrait oeuvre and the works at the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, as well as a new biography of the artist. Representations of G. F. Watts is indisputably the most substantial contribution within this centennial scholarship. The interpretations of his paintings and sculptures offered in this work explore the relationship to modern Victorian art scholarship of such important themes as Symbolism, the impact of Darwinian science, history painting debates, the emergence of paternalistic social consciousness, and Watts's contribution to national portraiture.

Elizabeth Prettejohn's discussion of Watts's idiosyncratic classical style and Stephanie Brown's analysis of his sculptural works provide nuanced reflections upon the problems of assigning monolithic Pheidian ideals to the artist. Fixing on the mutable nature of classical concepts in the nineteenth century, Prettejohn and Brown challenge simplistic categorisations of Watts as neo-classical, exploring the Romantic associations of his interest in the "ruined" surface and the entropic effects of degeneration (51). The fact that Watts can be described satisfactorily neither as a neo-classicist nor a social realist indicates the deeply problematic nature of his work, and the argument that runs through these essays is that this confusing predicament is symptomatic of the age in which he worked. Representations of G. F. Watts charts Watts's struggle to create a visual vocabulary that could address the modern problems of his industrial and empirical age, while sustaining the timeless metaphysical values he felt art should continue to promote. Watts possessed neither the ability nor the desire to transcend the material element in art. The new scholarship represented here clearly establishes him as an artist who did not allow the demands of his subject matter to obstruct his creative needs and sensibilities.

The essays provided by Janet McLean on history painting, Lara Perry on the National Portrait Gallery, Alison Smith on the Tate, and Shelagh Wilson on Watts's ideas on education, philanthropy, and women and the arts, each survey particular topics within Watts studies. These authors connect their discussions to the theoretical position Watts assumed on classical culture and idealism and establish his artistic interventions as part of a wider biographical narrative. As with other Victorian artists in their maturity, Watts's self-consciousness about his legacy motivated much of what he did in his twilight years, and his patriotic activities with the "House of Life" and the National Portrait Gallery may have been motivated as much by personal as by national glory.

Representations of G. F. Watts is part of a vibrant trend in Victorian art studies. Since the 1990s there has been a consolidated effort amongst historians to disassemble the modernist view of Victorian British art as a dysfunctional fault in the otherwise continuous development of a modern western artistic canon. According to this position, there were no innovative bright lights to equal France's avant-garde. Representations of G. F. Watts signifies the latest attempt by scholars to update such a view, exposing the true sophistication of one Victorian artist's engagement with form and process as well as subject and theory. The self-conscious engagement with artistic processes and materials has traditionally been seen as the reserve of modernists, rather than Victorian artists such as Leighton, with his academic methods, or W. P. Frith, with his obsession with "photographic" reportage. Nevertheless, Watts is shown in the essays by Paul Barlow, Prettejohn, and Colin Trodd to have shared many characteristics with the modernists. All three see his pseudo-existential struggle for articulation as central to his practice (33; 61; 67) and explore his remarkable fascination with surface (44). By tying Watts's engagement with materiality to his enthusiasm...