ABSTRACT
Given Sir Galahad's strong public association with Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad,” it is surprising to discover that it was Watts’s only Arthurian subject, that he would not confirm its affiliation with Tennyson’s poem, and that, although he staunchly suppported Britain’s imperialist ambitions, he was an agnostic. The painting is not a conventional illustration of a literary narrative. It has a life of its own, and it would be misleading to confine its interpetation to a Tennysonian framework. Watts appro priated the traditional figure of Galahad from the Ar thurian legend and adapted it to a post-Darwinian ag nostic agenda. He contended that modern moral codes could no longer be sustained by traditional religious ritual and dogma. His knight embodys an internal purity that harbingers the development of a naturalized, scientifically compatible ethical foundation for the modern world. Sir Galahad promotes the altruism of English chivalry as the climax of an evolutionary imperative.
