Written by Curatorial Advisor, Hilary Underwood.

In her catalogue note on this portrait, Mary Watts sums up William Morris’s wide-ranging achievements: ‘Poet and author in Prose, a man of extraordinary power and not less extraordinary energy. Ever to be remembered as the great artist in decoration, when taste was at its lowest ebb. His range was wide, embracing dyeing and weaving, tapestry and stained glass; he was also designer of his own types and founts [sic] for the book issued by his Kelmscott Press illustrated by his life-long friend Sir Edward Burne-Jones.’

On Loan from the National Portrait Gallery

Watts Gallery is privileged to display George Frederic Watts’s portrait of William Morris for the duration of our temporary exhibition, The Art of Wallpaper: Morris & Co. The painting has been lent to us by the National Portrait Gallery, which was the destination for the work from its conception – it was not painted for Morris himself. It is the best and most perceptive of the relatively few painted portraits of Morris. The National Portrait Gallery holds 68 portraits of the man, but most are photographs and of these many are duplicates. Morris is now widely recognized as one of the most significant figures of the Victorian age, with continuing relevance to us today. This is both for his contribution to design and for his political thought, especially in relation to work and the environment. Therefore, the Watts portrait of Morris is usually on permanent display at the NPG as a key painting in their Victorian displays. We are lucky to have it here.

Watts's "Hall of Fame" Portrait Collection

It is part of a collection of portraits that Watts painted ‘for the nation’, his so-called ‘Hall of Fame’. He probably developed the idea gradually, although it fitted well with his long and deeply held artistic ideals, that the greatest type of art should reach a broad public and do some good. These ideals led him to propose to decorate the Great Hall of Euston station with frescos in the early 1850s (unrealized) and undertake other public mural schemes in his earlier career. They led him to open his London studio to the public on Sundays from the 1870s on; to present major finished works to the Tate Gallery when it was founded in the 1890s and indeed to set up Watts Gallery itself.

A public collection of images of contemporaries who had made important contributions to society was Watts’s way of aligning his portrait painting with his ideals. He had begun to depict leading figures in Victorian society in Italy and England from the 1840s through commissions from Lord Holland, leaving studies and versions in his own collection, but the direct incentives for the ‘Hall of Fame’ probably came in 1856. The Crimean War created an outburst of patriotic feeling and a bill to create a National Portrait Gallery was approved by Parliament. Watts’s scheme had certainly formed by May 1861, when the Athenaeum magazine announced: ‘Mr. Watts has expressed his intention to leave to the nation, at his death, the valuable and interesting collection of contemporary portraits he has been for some years, and is still, forming.’ Watts began to request sittings from leading statesmen and authors, artists and churchmen.

After varied and unsatisfactory temporary homes, the National Portrait Gallery finally gained purpose-built premises in 1895 and the director Sir Lionel Cust and Watts’s close friend, Frederic Leighton encouraged him to donate eligible portraits in his lifetime. The Morris portrait was earmarked for eventual inclusion in the Gallery as early as September 1895, but the Gallery’s rules did not then allow portraits of living sitters. Morris died in October 1896, but Watts was then about to hold a major retrospective exhibition of his work at the New Gallery in Regent Street and wanted to include the portrait. It entered the National Portrait Gallery’s collection in 1897.

Painting William Morris in 1870

Watts painted William Morris in April 1870, as part of a concentrated scheme of work for the Hall of Fame in the second half of the 1860s. In this period, he was mainly painting artists and writers, following his Tennyson portrait of c.1863-4. Many of these sitters had frequented Little Holland House, where Watts lived as a guest of Henry Thoby Prinsep and his wife Sara Prinsep, featured in our recent exhibition, Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters. Sitters included Robert Browning, poet (1866), Thomas Carlyle, historian and philosopher (c. 1868-9) and Henry Taylor, poet and dramatist, although his work is now read only by literature specialists (c.1868-70). The most interesting section of these sitters, into which the Morris portrait fits, is a sort of ‘post-Pre-Raphaelite’ circle, of which Watts himself was a fringe member.

These were artists and writers in the circle of Dante Gabriel Rossetti which came to prominence in the 1860s, whose sensuous and decorative imagery questioned the prevailing narrow Victorian morality. The Watts portraits included Rossetti himself, poet and painter, (c.1871) and Algernon Charles Swinburne, poet (1867). Watts’s portrait of Burne-Jones, Morris’s closest artistic associate (1870), fits into this group. It may have been meant for the Hall of Fame, but Watts gave it to the artist’s wife Georgiana. She considered leaving it to the National Portrait Gallery but finally decided it should hang with the collection of her husband’s work in the art gallery in his native Birmingham. In this period Watts painted another fringe member of the group, his close friend and neighbour, Frederic Leighton, but after it was exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1871, this went to the sitter and recently joined the Leighton House collection. Watts’s Leighton portrait for the Hall of Fame was created later in 1881. The 1860s bout of Hall of Fame painting came to an end at the beginning of the 1870s. The looming demolition of old Little Holland House for re-development meant that Watts focused on commissioned portraits for the next few years, to finance the building of two new houses, one for himself and the Prinseps on the Isle of Wight near Sara Prinsep’s sister Julia Margaret Cameron, the other a studio house for himself on the new Melbury Road near the old site, confusingly also called Little Holland House.

A Portrait Created Under Difficult Circumstances

Watts’s Morris portrait was created under difficult circumstances. William Morris wrote to his wife Jane on 15 April 1870:

‘Dearest Janey, Many thanks for note: I was glad to hear from you… I am going to sit to Watts this afternoon, though I have got a devil of a cold-in-the-head, which don’t make it very suitable.’

Morris appears to have had a naturally ruddy complexion, and contemporaries often compared his looks to those of a sea-captain, but the portrait does record a rather flushed appearance.

It appears to have been painted very spontaneously. In the ‘Notes’ section devoted to the work in her manuscript catalogue of George Watts’s finished oil paintings (Watts Gallery collection), Mary Watts records: ‘There exists a legend that Mr. Watts had but one sitting for the fine head in this portrait.’ Watts usually took three to five sittings to paint a head, but he was capable of painting with great speed and directness. Watts Gallery owns his painting of Henry John Talbot, 18th Earl of Shrewsbury and Talbot (1862: COMWG 52), of which Mary Watts records: ‘This portrait was painted during one morning at Blickling Hall to give Louisa Marchioness Waterford the pleasure of seeing the handling of oil colour, when a portrait was being painted with absolute directness from life without any further sittings.’ Only a detailed technical examination by the National Portrait Gallery could confirm or deny the legend of the single sitting, and even this would be complicated by the fact that Watts reworked the painting before its first exhibition ten years later. But it is worth noting, looking at unfinished paintings in Watts Gallery’s collection, that Watts appears to have painted male sitters with great directness, modelling their faces in colour from the early stages (Henry Taylor, c.1865-70: COMWG.96, Richard Burton, 1879 – 1880: COMWG.176) whereas painting female sitters seems to have been a more considered process, with their faces modelled in monochrome (Florence Nightingale, 1868: COMWG.152, Violet Lindsay, 1879: COMWG.148), probably in advance of thin glazes of colour creating a clear translucent complexion, best seen in our LillieLangtry, 1880 (COMWG.43).

It is unclear what Watts did to the portrait after its first completion in 1870 and before its first exhibition in 1880. I wonder about the date of the ‘wallpaper’-like streaks of foliage in the background, because they would mean somewhat different things in 1870 and in 1880. In 1870, Morris’s famous decorative firm, then called Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., founded in 1861, had existed for about a decade. Morris had designed his first wallpapers and created interiors for St. James’s Palace and the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) but the bulk of the firm’s work, for which they then had the greatest fame, was the production of stained glass for churches old and new. What Morris was famous for in 1870 was poetry, although the popularity of his later poetry has barely survived. His long narrative poem with a classical theme, The Life and Death of Jason of 1867 was a great success, and he followed it up with the Earthly Paradise in three volumes, 1868 – 1870: twenty-four verse tales, half classical, half northern, in a narrative framing device, rather along the lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. A large part of their popularity was their retelling of classical myths and legends in a form suitable for family consumption.

The Meaning Behind the Foliage

The foliage in the background of the Morris portrait is like bay leaves, symbol of poetry, such as Watts had used more obviously in the background of his Hall of Fame Tennyson and Henry Taylor portraits. A recent addition to the National Gallery’s collection in 1860 had been an early 16th century Venetian portrait , believed to be the poet Ariosto, where the half-length sitter is backed with bay leaves. (Palma Vecchio, Portrait of a Poet, National Gallery N00637) This portrait probably gave Watts the idea for including and in 1870, the main meaning of the leaves in the Morris portrait would have been ‘poetry’. Watt first showed the portrait in the Grosvenor Gallery Summer Exhibition of 1880. By this date, William Morris had taken the running of his firm into his own hands, reorganizing it as Morris & Co. As the movement in middle class artistic taste, known as the Aesthetic Movement, grew in importance in the 1870s, reaching its height in the years around 1880, Morris increased his focus on design for domestic interiors, creating many of his most famous designs for wallpapers and textiles. The Grosvenor Gallery was at the centre of the Aesthetic Movement, so if the leaves in the background of the Morris portrait were added for the exhibition, their main meaning would have been decorative design. Or maybe they were always meant to be ambiguous: Morris was, after all, always both poet and designer.

Exhibition History

After its first belated showing, Watts included the portrait in a string of exhibitions, starting with his solo show at the Grosvenor Gallery and including his pioneering exhibition in New York: he was clearly proud of it. Here they are: Grosvenor Gallery, 1881-2; New York, 1885; Birmingham, 1885-6; Nottingham 1886; Guildhall 1890; Manchester [no date given]; Southwark 1894; Chester 1895; New Gallery 1896. And this is because it shows how Watts excels as a portrait painter.

Watts as a Portrait Painter

Using a very simple format, of head and shoulders, no hands, he responds to the personality of the sitter to create a powerful impression of their essential character, through the choices he makes in the direction of the head, the gaze, the lighting. He captures for me Morris’s strength of character, but also his sensitivity and a sort of underlying tentativeness, which is found in his more personal poems like the Months lyrics in the Earthly Paradise. More superficial likenesses miss these depths. When Watts created this painting, Morris had, after all, weathered and was still weathering a series of professional and personal crises. His private income from Devon copper mine shares had collapsed: he was no longer a wealthy young man playing at business: he had to give up his beloved first home Red House, to live ‘over the shop’ in Queen Square in London, work on the profitability of the firm and be thankful for the success of his poetry. Meanwhile Rossetti and Morris’s wife had fallen mutually in love, and Morris, with great generosity of spirit, but clearly at great emotional cost, had accepted this and was to make the relationship possible through renting Kelmscot Manor jointly with Rossetti.

This sort of psychological depth was Watts aimed at in his portraiture, as Tennyson recorded in a metaphor in his poem Elaine based on what Watts had told him.

‘As when a painter, poring on a face
Divinely through all hindrance finds the man
Behind it, and so paints him that his face
The shape and colour of a mind and life,
Lives for his children, ever at his best and fullest.’