G. F. Watts: Parables in Paint

1 December 2008 – 30 July 2009
St Paul's Cathedral, London

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G. F. Watts: Parables in Paint, explores the religious and spiritual dimension of Watts’s art and the way that this underpins his sense of social responsibility. The exhibition consists of 30 oil paintings and drawings from the collection of Watts Gallery.

G. F. Watts was one of Victorian England’s greatest religious painters. However, unlike his contemporary, William Holman Hunt, painter of The Light of the World, he did not possess a conventional religious faith. The Christianity to which he was exposed as a child emphasised sin and a judging, vengeful God. The experience left the artist suspicious of organised, conventional religion.

Yet his Christian upbringing shaped the moral and social ideals which he conveys through his art and coloured his choice of biblical subject matter. Watts also retained a sense of the profound importance of a spirituality which gives meaning and value to material existence. This understanding grew deeper as he grew older.

Alongside the exhibition, two paintings by GF Watts from St Paul’s collection will be hung in the Cathedral’s nave – Time, Death and Judgement and Peace and Goodwill.

Canon Henry Scott Holland (1847 – 1918) asked GF Watts to donate a work of art to St Paul’s Cathedral. Watts and Holland shared similar views on social reform and the artist’s retrospective of the New Gallery in 1897 fired the clergyman’s desire “to see two great works of his in St Paul’s.” Watts gifted Time, Death and Judgement to the Cathedral by 1899. To the “dear old man”, the Canon wrote, “our heartfelt thanks, in the name of all the tramps in the nave….. [the painting] is perfectly splendid, glowing, beautiful. It quite peoples the church. I have been revelling all day in the glory of it”.

It was not until 1908 that Holland’s ambition of having two paintings by Watts in the centre of the Cathedral was completed. Mary Watts gave Peace and Goodwill to St Paul’s in 1907 and it was hung shortly afterwards in 1908, exactly one hundred years ago.

A series of events will be held alongside the exhibition, including:

The Scott Holland Sermon (7 December) – Dean of York, The Very Reverend Keith Jones, will preach a sermon about Canon Henry Scott Holland at the 11.30am Sung Eucharist.

The 2009 Watts Symposium (26 & 27 February) The opening day of the event will take place at Guildhall and will explore Watts within the context of the Victorian age, taking into consideration the artistic, literary and spiritual movements influential at that time.
Click here for further details of the Symposium