The Grand Old Man at Compton

In 1890 Watts leased land at Compton and had a house built by Ernest George named Limnerslease. Around this time Watts and his wife were introduced to an orphan named Lilian Mackintosh (later Mrs Michael Chapman) whom they adopted and who became heir to part of their personal estate. In 1903 Watts created a purpose-built gallery and moved all his paintings from Little Holland House Gallery to the Compton gallery, which opened to the public on 1 April 1904.

Watts’s reputation was consolidated both nationally and internationally with exhibitions in Paris and Munich, and in Britain he was a household name. Images of the grand old man of painting with his Titianesque cap and robes were familiar throughout the country. Furthermore, Watts developed a working relationship with the photographer Frederick Hollyer (1838-1933) in order to record his output and circulate his paintings to a wide audience. He also instigated a memorial garden of ‘everyday heroes’ in the form of a 50-foot-long open gallery situated in public gardens on the site of the former churchyard of St Botolph, Aldersgate, and called Postman’s Park. Along the walls of the gallery Watts placed tablets, each describing acts of bravery that resulted in the loss of the hero or heroine’s life. Despite his age and increasingly longer periods away from London, Watts remained remarkably active and a ceaseless experimenter, producing the remarkable and almost abstract painting, Sower of the Systems, exhibited at the New Gallery in 1903.

Watts died on 1 July 1904 after he had seen the Watts Gallery open in Compton and major bequests to the National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery of British Art (now Tate). International obituaries followed; tributes were published in books; the composer Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) wrote music for his funeral and dedicated his Symphony No.6 to the artist; and a touring Watts Memorial Exhibition travelled to the Royal Academy, London, and to Newcastle, Edinburgh, Manchester and Dublin between 1905 and 1906. The Compton collection of Watts’s paintings, which was inherited by Mrs Chapman, was divided on her death in 1972 and works previously in the collection went into private hands.

Mark Bills

The above passages are excerpts from G.F.Watts - Victorian Visionary by Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant, Yale Publishing. Buy the book here.