Pen drawings of a man in a plumed helmet — G F Watts, *Boccaccio*, 1844-87, pen on paper
Watts Gallery Trust

Pen sketch of a man on a rearing horse — G F Watts, *Bocaaccio*, 1844- 47, pen on paper
Watts Gallery Trust

These pen drawings are studies for George Frederic Watts’s 30ft-long oil painting, A Story from Boccaccio.

The story comes from The Decameron, a book of stories by Giovanni Boccaccio. It tells of the spirits of a knight and woman who are doomed to act out a violent hunt every Friday as punishment for their sins in life.

The charging horseman is drawn with rapid, dramatic lines, giving a sense of how he will burst violently out of the forest. The knight wears an ornate helmet with a lion’s face and crest. George also gave the knight a walrus-like moustache, which makes him look more like an animal than a person. In the painting he is cleanshaven, but it may have been George’s original plan to have an angry, animal-like horseman as a stronger contrast to the nude woman he hunts.