The Works on Paper Collection
Watts Gallery’s extensive collection of works on paper comprises over 800 drawings and watercolours and some 130 prints. The drawings provide unique insight into the artist’s development documented through the evolution of ideas and designs for well-known allegorical paintings and portraits. Watts’s studio sketches and studies were often not intended for public display and offer an introduction to the artist’s working methods and techniques. Watts worked in a wide range of media including pencil, silverpoint, chalk and charcoal on diverse paper varieties of different colours and textures.
Watts showed artistic talent at a very early age which is demonstrated in highly accomplished copies after well-known artists produced when he was just ten. The collection also comprises numerous compositional studies for some of Watts’s best known allegorical pictures including an early study for Hope sketched on the reverse of a visiting card of a Miss Hope. The smaller working sketches are complemented by large and detailed finished studies for Watts’s best-known works intended for the Nation and given to Tate Britain, including a sanguine version of Hope and a black chalk Messenger, both drawings of the scale of the finished oil paintings.
Another highlight of our drawings collection is a detailed watercolour of Watts’s original studio in Melbury Road produced by Thomas Rooke (Burne-Jones’s and Ruskin’s assistant), featuring Watts’s studio furniture, anatomical casts and paintings, now at Watts Gallery collection.
