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Picture of the Month

January 2010:

Thomas Rooke - Interior of Watts’s Studio,
6 Melbury Rd, Holland Park, 1904

Watercolour on board
55.6 cm x 65.7 cm

Thomas Matthews Rooke (1842-1942) was a painter, draughtsman and distinguished watercolorist. His works depict wide ranging subjects that included architecture, religion, mythology and imaginative subjects as well as portraits, landscapes and domestic interiors.

His watercolour depicting the Interior of Watts’s Studio, 6 Melbury Rd, Holland Park was painted in August 1904, shortly after Watts’ death. With this in mind, the laurel wreath on top of Watts’ death mask on the right of the central table seems aptly placed and suggests that Rooke carefully selected certain items to hint at Watts’ death as well as life. This watercolour was originally given as a commemorative gift to Mary Seton Watts from Mrs Percy Wyndham. It was possibly given as a thoughtful memento as she realised that following her husband’s death, Mary would be moving permanently to live in Compton.

G.F. Watts had lived for over 20 years in the dowers house on the Holland Estate and following the expiration of his lease, in 1874, he had commissioned Frederick Pepys Cockerell to build a studio house for him on fashionable Melbury Road. By 1876 he was settling into his new home, which became known as the new Little Holland House. Watts’ home now included a picture gallery, a painting and a sculpture studio, which were both two floors high and north facing (see plans at the end of this article). For a time, his neighbours included other artists such as Marcus Stone, Luke Fildes and Hamo Thorneycroft and the Wattses owned the building up until 1906 when Mary finally sold it.

Several of the paintings, pieces of furniture and anatomical casts within this painting are now in the Watts Gallery collection. On the far left under the window is Watts’ wooden painting table, (COMWG2007.924) which has two metal inserts which divide it up into various sections so that the artist could mix numerous colours at once. Another piece of furniture used by Watts is his three- tiered steps in the right- hand corner, which was used for working on large paintings. The plaster horse on his hind legs at the far left of the painting may be COMWG2007.956, a small sculpture by Joseph Edgar Boehm (1834- 1890). There are still over fifty plaster casts of hands, feet, arms, shoulders, wrists, heads, and collar bones in various conditions within the Watts Gallery collection. One of these is attached to the wall and may be COMWG2007.1001, a life-size plaster anatomical cast of an outstretched right arm, without a hand. Watts made a number of drawings from casts as well as from life which can also be found in the collection at Watts Gallery.

It is possible to make out several of Watts’ paintings in the studio. On the left- hand side is Mrs G. F. Watts in a Straw Hat (COMWGNC.15), painted in 1887. The painting was completed on the couple’s honeymoon in Constantinople. The painting is so subtle that it seems as if pastel was the medium used but in fact Watts attains this appearance by using thin oil washes. In the work Watts focuses his attention on the depiction of the exposed, female neck, a recurrent motif in his art. As in his paintings of Clytie, The Slumber in the Ages, The Return of Godiva among others, the female neck is portrayed as muscular and twisting yet the extension and femininity of each is made clear through the colours Watts uses to highlight female vulnerability.

One of the last paintings that Watts worked on was the large painting of Orpheus and Eurydice, painted in c.1900- 03 (COMWG.134) which is behind the central table in Rooke’s watercolour. On the far right tucked behind a writing desk is Watts’ allegorical painting called The Spirit of Christianity from1872- 5 (in Nottingham Castle, Museum and Art Gallery). By painting the artists' studio just after his death, Rooke demonstrates Watts’ life ethos of hard work through the display of a number of paintings stacked up between various painting tools and aids and yet the place exudes brightness and seems calm and organized, which is something Watts would have been pleased with.

Catherine Hilary
Curatorial Fellow at Watts Gallery

This watercolour will be on display in an exhibition entitled Artists and their Studios at Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia from 9th February to 23rd May 2010. Further information about Watts’ life at his home and studio in London can be discovered in the new publication Little Holland House and Gallery by Barbara Bryant which is coming out later this month.