Watts Symposium
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Further Information:
symposium@wattsgallery.org.uk or call 01483 810235
Speakers:
(Click on the names in red to read their abstracts)
Dr Caroline Arscott
Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century British Art, Courtauld Institute of Art
Mark Bills
Curator, Watts Gallery
Judith Bronkhurst
Art Historian, Courtauld Institute, London
Barbara Bryant
Consultant Curator and Co-Author GF Watts Victorian Visionary (Guildhall 2008-2009) and Author of GF Watts: Portraits – Fame & Beauty in Victorian Society (NPG 2004-2005)
James Dewar
Administrator, Lincoln’s Inn
Veronica Franklin Gould
Author of G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian (Yale University Press, 2004) and Curator of The Vision of G. F. Watts (Watts Gallery, 2004)
Professor Sir Christopher Frayling
Vice-Provost and Rector, Royal College of Art, Chairman, Arts Council of England
Janet Lee
MA History of Art and Design (Bristol), unpublished MA dissertation: Spirit, Symbol and Devotion: the Watts Chapel (1895-1904); Jungian Psychotherapist
Leonée Ormond
Professor Emerita, King’s College, London
John Price
Historian, King’s College, London
Professor Ben Quash
Professor of Christianity & the Arts, King's College London
Allen Staley
Professor Emeritus of Art History, Columbia University
David Stewart
Art Historian, UA Huntsville
Dr. Colin Trodd
Director of Post-Graduate Studies in Art History, University of Manchester
Hilary Underwood
Tutor in the History of Art, University of Surrey and Curatorial Advisor, Watts Gallery
Martin Warner
Treasurer, St Paul’s Cathedral
Watts Symposium 2009
Thursday 26 February 2009, Guildhall Art Gallery, London
Friday 27 February 2009, St. Paul's Cathedral, London
£75 for two days / £40 for one day
Concession - £55 for two days / £35 for one day
(Concessions include - unwaged, senior citizens, students, Friends of Watts Gallery, Friends of Guildhall Art Gallery, Friends of St Paul's Cathedral and Clergy from the Diocese of London.)
Watts Gallery is delighted to confirm details of the 3rd annual Watts Symposium, which has been timed to coincide with two major exhibitions of Watts’s work at The Guildhall Art Gallery and St Paul’s Cathedral. The list of speakers includes Professor Sir Christopher Frayling.
The 2009 Symposium will explore the life and work of G. F. Watts within the context of the Victorian age, taking into consideration the artistic, literary and spiritual movements influential at the time.
Order of Speakers and Timetable
Click here to see the complete timetable for both days
Abstracts
Caroline Arscott
Watts: Time, Death and Protoplasm
This paper investigates the importance of the idea of protoplasm for the mid to late Victorian imagination. Scientific research into elementary organisms led to a revision of the understanding of organic matter and the origins and properties of life. Debates raised issues of spirituality and volition versus uncontrollable impulses observable in the basic responsive qualities of vital living entities. Watts's interest in primal energy, universal bonds and the prospect of dissolution will be examined in the light of these scientific debates. The paper will make reference to Robert Louis Stevenson's essay of 1888 'Pulvis et Umbra' in which man is described as a 'disease of the agglutinated dust', a monstrous swelling of protoplasm and linked in terms of being to the dog, the ant and the millipede.
Mark Bills
Watts and Mammon
G F Watts saw Mammonism as the great evil of his age and he “would often preach against Mammon worship”. This paper will consider what Watts understood by Mammonism and how the artist’s exploration of this idea was manifest in several of his late works. Dismissed by many commentators as crude didactic statements about greed, “in which art is servant” and symbols “merely signposts”. This talk will explore how such interpretations fail to take account of their strong spiritual dimension and the extraordinary visual language that they adopt. In particular it will discuss three late paintings, Mammon, For He Had Great Possessions and Can These Bones Live? Watts noting the latter as “my opinion of the civilization of the present time,” and whose symbolic still-life was described by the symbolist painter Fernand Knopff, as “sick gems, as one might fancy’.
Judith Bronkhurst
Art in Whitechapel. – A Light in Dark Places
Devoted to ameliorating the lot of the poor, Samuel Augustus Barnett and his wife Henrietta eagerly embraced Samuel's appointment to the benefice of St Jude's, Whitechapel, in 1873. This East End parish was the most deprived in the Bishop of London's gift, with a tiny church-going population. For the Barnetts, generous doses of culture were an essential component of their primary role as social workers: free concerts and lectures, and the establishment of a public lending library, culminated in the establishment of the Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibition in 1881. Until 1898 these free exhibitions, held every Easter holidays in St Jude's School, drew enormous crowds of working-class visitors, helped by the fact that they were open on Sundays and Good Fridays and until late in the evening.
This paper will discuss how the pictures were selected and the range of loans on view. Although some very recent works were included, these were large survey shows which included pictures by the all greatest luminaries of the Victorian art world as well as a sprinkling of Old Masters and some contemporary continental exhibits. Watts was one of the Barnett's most enthusiastic supporters. His generosity and those of other lenders, from the Queen downwards, suggest not only a widespread desire to shed 'light in a dark place' but also the high estimate in which fine art was held as a civilising influence. They ensured that the Easter exhibitions rivalled in quality the summer exhibitions held at this period in London's West End.
Barbara Bryant
Watts on display in his own time: the collection at the Little Holland House Gallery
In 1881 Watts's self-created gallery at his residence in Kensington represented a new departure in the presentation of his work to the public. The gallery played a key role in his strategy to promote his art and also corresponded to his general beliefs on making his art accessible to a wide audience. For an artist to take control of the display of his own work and his own image (as Watts did) proved to be an important intervention in the cult of the artist as personality in the later decades of the 19th century. In anticipation of a larger study on the display of Watts's work, I will in this paper assess the nature of the Little Holland House Gallery, what Watts showed, how he showed it and the impact of the gallery.
James Dewar
George Frederic Watts and Lincoln's Inn
The Great Hall at Lincoln’s Inn in Holborn contains the first genuine fresco ever completed in this country. Watts’ journeys through Italy as a young artist inspired him to ask permission to paint this monumental portrayal of the Lawgivers of History (more formally entitled Justice: A Hemicycle of Lawgivers) soon after the Great Hall was built and opened by Queen Victoria in 1845. The painting, completed in 1859, has inspired thousands of student barristers throughout the last 150 years as they dine, with the famous lawgivers of history watching over them as they begin their careers at the Bar.
James Dewar, the Assistant Under Treasurer of Lincoln’s Inn, will describe the long association Watts enjoyed with Lincoln’s Inn, from his being commissioned to produce this historic painting in 1852 through the completion of his more traditional portrait of Lord Selborne, which was commissioned in 1893 and culminating in the return in 1925 by his widow of the beautiful silver cup which the Inn had presented to Watts to commemorate his work for the Inn.
Veronica Franklin Gould
White elephant or Masterpiece? – How Watts presented His Art to National and International Collections.
Watts set himself a dual mission for Britain, to paint a portrait collection of leaders of the era and a universal symbolic series of pictures about Life, Love and Death, which he presented, respectively, to the openings of the National Portrait Gallery in 1896 and National Gallery of British Art (Tate) in 1897. In addition, he gave individual paintings to inspire international galleries of modern art. Supremely confident in his aims, the artist was uncertain as to whether, in particular, the Symbolist series would appeal to the nation. This paper outlines Watts's aims for the presentation of these works through exhibition and use of the press ,and the response of the British and international art world, then and now.
Prof. Sir Christopher Frayling
“’To do the right deed for the wrong reason’ – spirituality and the arts since Watts’ time”.
Look up any written survey of ‘Religion and Art’ in the twentieth century, and you will see illustrations of the usual suspects: Henry Moore’s sculpture in Northampton, Graham Sutherland’s tapestry in Coventry, maybe Bill Viola in Durham. Plus, outside the Church, Dali’s Christ of St John of the Cross and some of Stanley Spencer’s paintings. And that’s about it. When you think of the richness of European art since the onset of Modernism – Cubism, Surrealism, Abstraction, Pop and beyond – it’s a pretty thin list, and mainly clustered around the twenty years 1942-1962. This paper explores why 1942–1962, and what has been happening since. In particular, it explores why the ‘instinctive sympathy’ between artists and especially the established church – which was often publicly discussed in the interwar years – has evaporated. Arts and Crafts nostalgia – and laments about the decline of ‘a shared symbolic order’ – can no longer fill the gap. So, where do we go from here?
Janet Lee
Spirit, Symbol and Devotion: The Watts Cemetery Chapel (1895-1904)
Compton’s beautiful and mystical cemetery Chapel, funded and fathered by G F Watts, designed by his wife Mary Seton Watts and decorated by the people of Compton at the very end of the Victorian era, appears at first encounter to stand alone in the Surrey countryside as a work of art without architectural precedent. However, it was in fact a very modern Gesamtkunstwerk, a cumulative public legacy of the Watts’ lives and interests, built to honour their friends and to celebrate the work of the Arts and Crafts movement in which they played a pivotal part as benefactors of the Settlement movement and the Home Arts and Industries Association, then in full flower.
Using Mary’s notebooks, illustrations from The Studio (first published 1893), and other contemporary sources, this paper places the Chapel in the context of the applied arts at the fin-de-siècle both in Britain and in Europe. It briefly discusses some of the Chapel’s symbolism in relation to the cultural currents of the time, looking back to the past and forward to the new century. These include the Celtic Revival, national folktales and mythical romance, recent archaeological discoveries in the ancient east, and the theosophical and other occult and religious movements whose powerful esoteric testimonies to sacred transformation and the afterlife brought comfort against the anxious uncertainties of rapid material change. Lastly, it relates how the Chapel was a profound personal expression of the Watts’ own inner spiritual feelings and their absolute devotion to each other.
Leonée Ormond
G. F. Watts and Music
Watts was born into a musical home, with a father who was a pianoforte maker and piano tuner. The painter’s own instrument was the violin, and there are reports that he sang with pleasure, particularly popular ballads like Dibdin’s Tom Bowling. The composers whom he most admired were Handel and Beethoven. He enjoyed attending concerts in the homes of friends like Frederic Leighton.
During his life, Watts painted a number of portraits of musicians. The Watts Gallery collection includes a strange double portrait of the singer Georgina Traherne whom, together with other musicians, Watts met at Little Holland House. One of his most impressive portraits is that of the violinist Joseph Joachim. Watts was commended for his accuracy in rendering the performer’s hands.
Music has part to play in a number of Watts’ allegorical paintings. In the most famous, Hope, the figure is shown with a lute. The story of Orpheus was one to which he returned. Watts’ paintings also inspired composers, most notably Charles Villiers Stanford whose Sixth Symphony bears the dedication: ‘In honour of the life-work of a great artist: G F Watts’.
John Price
Heroism in Every-day Life: The Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice.
The Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, located in Postman’s Park in the City of London, is a touching and evocative example of how the past can survive amidst the hustle and bustle of the modern world. Ceramic tablets mounted within a wooden cloister provide details of sixty-one individuals - men, women and children - each of whom died while heroically attempting to save the life of another. This memorial to heroism, which was created by G.F.Watts in 1900, reveals much about the artist and his beliefs, as well as stimulating questions about the nature of heroism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to a brief history of the monument, this paper will also engage with Watts’s motivations and examine the concept of ‘everyday’ heroism through a case study of one of those commemorated on the memorial; the Nursemaid, Alice Ayres. How was it that a humble domestic servant and many others like her, came to feature on a grand Victorian monument to heroism - a concept most often associated with the great actions of great men – and how does this alter our understanding of the subject?
Bio:
John Price is a Historian at King’s College London and the author of Postman’s Park: G.F.Watts’s Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice (Watts Gallery, 2008)
Ben Quash
Plotinian Plots and G.F Watts
Taking as its starting point the quotation from Plotinus used as epitaph on Watts’s memorial, this paper will set Watts’s - even if not very profound – influence by Plotinus within a broader context: an evaluation of the power of neo-Platonic ideas amongst artists and theologians in the nineteenth-century. Coleridge’s writings on aesthetics may prove an especially useful source here, who wrote:
O pure of heart! thou need’st not ask of me,
What this strong music in the soul may be;
What and wherein it doth subsist,
This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
This beautiful, and beauty-making power!
Joy, O beloved! joy, that ne’er was given,
Save to the pure and in their purest hour,
Life of our life, the parent and the birth,
Which, wedding nature, to us gives in dower
A new heaven and a new earth,
Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud-
This is the strong voice, this the luminous cloud!
In part, the appeal of such ideas may have been their apparent offer of a de-particularized or generic ‘religious’ discourse in which the ideas of different specific religious traditions could be unified. With barely any additional tweaking, art as a medium for participation in God’s being could also be welcomed into this religious company – for contemplation of art was to Plotinus a pathway towards God (it is the purity of art’s relationship with the One that accounts for Plotinus’ high regard of it). Hence, perhaps, Watts’s readiness to style himself as a sort of high priest of art, and his ease at combining symbols and themes from very different religious sources. In this respect, and in a way underwritten by a certain borrowing of Plotinian ideas, he is an early instance of the eclecticism which characterizes the contemporary taste for ‘spirituality’ as opposed to ‘organized religion’.
Prof. Allen Staley
Watts and the New Painting of the 1860s
The paper will serve as a kind of testing of the waters for a yet unwritten chapter devoted to Watts in a book, upon which I have been engaged for some years, tentatively entitled "The New Painting of the 1860s". The book addresses what in my opinion were radical new developments in English painting brought about in that decade by several artists such as Whistler, Leighton, Burne-Jones, Simeon Solomon, and Albert Moore, born variously between 1830 and 1841. As a much older figure, born in 1817, who had significant success as early as 1843 in the competition to choose artists to paint frescoes in the Houses of Parliament, Watts belonged to an earlier generation. Yet, his own art from the 1860s seems quite different from what it had been in the 1840s and 1850s, different in ways that link it to the work of his younger colleagues. The paper will attempt to look at some aspects of the evolution of his painting in relation to what was going around him during a period that would prove to be the richest, most productive ten years of his long career.
David Stewart
G. F. Watts and “The Manliness of Noble Womanhood”
We know G. F. Watts as a painter of beautiful women, as a painter of charming young girls, as “Signor” to his coddling female admirers. In short we might call him the quintessential Victorian patriarch of the brush. Watts spent nearly his entire life with a whole host of angels in the house. From the adoring Lady Holland, to the adoring Sarah Prinsep, to the adoring Mary Watts, George Frederic built his artistic fame with the aid of a phalanx of adoring women. Though true in its outline this patriarchal story is too simple. It does not account for his style when painting portraits of women, for his words when discussing women, for his iconography when painting his female subject pictures, or for his deference when painting for those who pressed for women’s rights. Watts was a supporter of women’s suffrage who praised “the manliness of noble womanhood- manliness”. His stated ideal helps to explain three curious facts. Many art critics of Watts’s day were disturbed by the “manly” quality of his paintings of women, many women’s rights supporters lauded Watts’s paintings for just these same qualities, and many of today’s art historians have discovered fragments of this peculiar side of his paintings. Just how far outside of patriarchal norms was Watts willing to go for his friends who pressed for new rights for women? Perhaps just far enough to approach his own unsettling ideal: “the manliness of noble womanhood”.
Watts and the End of Victorian Culture; Or, Why Watts Became Unwanted
Colin Trodd (University of Manchester)
In the early decades of the twentieth century a host of well-placed critics came forward to identify Watts as the incarnation of total critical failure, or to complain that his most famous images derived from an inability to understand the real purpose of Michelangelo’s terribiltá. On the one hand, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf presented Watts as a sterile guardian of moral law, the artistic embodiment of Nietzsche’s vision of those Victorian thinkers who, having rejected God, replaced him with a secularised model of Christian dogma based on universal truths of psychology and ethics. On the other hand, key cultural managers, such as D. S. MacColl and J. P. Manson, dismissed Watts as an outrageous academic narcissist: all he could do was invent sub-intellectual subjects to mask his ‘commonness of form’ and ‘vulgarity of colour’.
This paper probes and tests these readings by looking at the writings of E. H. Short and James Laver, both of whom who rejected the vision of Watts as an obsolescent colossus obsessed with reducing generative experience to moralising formula. These semi-forgotten ‘popular’ writers of the 1920s and 1930s tended to rescue Watts by recasting him as a Blakean figure, a vivid, durable and complex outsider, who saw the image world as a difficult process of transferring enclosed mental representations into shared symbolic forms. Looking back on this material, the paper explores a cultural moment and institutional situation when counter-attacks on modernist readings of Watts coincided with the canonisation of Blake by modernist critics, curators and commentators.
Colin Trodd is the co-editor, co-author and author of several books on British art, including Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (1999), Representations of G. F. Watts (2004), Blake’s Shadow (2008) and Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World 1830-1930 (2009)
Hilary Underwood
Patterns of Change in G. F. Watts's Religious Art.
Ranging from the Meeting of Jacob and Esau (Royal Academy 1868) to The All Pervading (New Gallery 1896) Watts's choices of biblical and religious subjects shows significant change over his long professional career. This paper explores the pattern of his changing choices, including consideration of what he does not represent. It sets them in the context of Watts's religious background and the changing Victorian religious and cultural context. It also explores the critical reaction to his religious art, suggesting some reasons for the popularity of some of these works around 1900.
Martin Warner
The Body of Christ in St Paul’s Cathedral
This paper will explore the ways in which St Paul’s Cathedral, as a sacred space and an exhibition space, is used to convey the Christian understanding of the body of Christ.
It is noticeable that Watts found the injunction of the second commandment problematic. The presentation of the body of Christ as revealed in the incarnation is therefore not accessible to him as a subject for painting. But this does not prevent exploration of other ways in which the body of Christ is understood to exist, principally through the Church but also in the human person. It is in these sacramental and incarnational senses that Canon Henry Scott Holland recognised the artistic contribution by Watts to the Christian narrative.
We shall consider what theological trends in the 19th century contributed to how Watts shaped his narrative of Christian faith and its reference to the body of Christ. We shall also explore the limitations that some of those trends might have imposed upon his aspirations, and ask how effective Watts paintings were in achieving their goals.
Finally we shall enquire what kind of iconographic language might be employed today to communicate the Christian gospel that Watts and Scott Holland interpreted through the cultural idiom of their own time.
Martin Warner is Treasurer of St Paul’s Cathedral. He grew up in Rochester, studied theology at St Chad’s College, Durham and trained for the priesthood at St Stephen’s House, Oxford. Following curacies in inner-city parishes in Plymouth and Leicester he served for nine years as Priest Administrator of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk.
Previous Events:
Watts Symposium 2007
G F Watts, Art and Social Concerns
Thursday 20 September
Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey
Friday 21 September
Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Presented by Watts Gallery with the support of The Courtauld Institute of Art
“My intention has not been so much to paint pictures that will charm the eye, as to suggest great thoughts that will appeal to the imagination and the heart, and kindle all that is best and noblest in humanity.” G F Watts
A two-day Symposium exploring the impact of key social issues on the work of the Victorian artist, George Frederic Watts OM RA. Bringing together experts in the fields of Victorian art, history and literature to consider how Watts and his contemporaries reacted to these concerns and how the legacy of their pioneering responses can be felt today.
The Watts Symposium 2007 was a great success with more than 50 people attending on each day. A fuller report of the results of the two day symposium will be be published here in due course. Thank you to everyone who attended the event and to The Courtauld Institute of Art for their support.
Speakers Inlcuded:
Anne Anderson – Senior Lecturer, Southampton Institute
Mark Bills – Curator, Watts Gallery
Barbara Bryant – Consultant Curator, Author GF Watts: Portraits of Fame & Beauty in Victorian Society
Julia Dudkiewicz – Assistant Curator, Watts Gallery
Veronica Franklin Gould – Author of G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian and Curator of The Vision of G. F. Watts’.
Christopher Jordan – Curator, South London Gallery
Paul Nelson – Course Leader, Fine Art, UCCA
Leonée Ormond – Professor Emerita, King’s College, London
Julian Treuherz – Former Keeper of Art Galleries, National Museums Liverpool
Alex Werner – Senior Curator, Museum of London
Professor Michael Wheeler – Chairman, Ruskin Society and Visiting Professor
Through the generosity of The Derek Hill Foundation we were able to offer a small number of bursaries for this Symposium. We would like to thank them for their support.