ABSTRACT
Of all the major players in the late-Victorian art world, George Frederic Watts remains the most shadowy, elusive, quixotic, and yet the easiest to patronize or dismiss. In narratives of Victorian painting Watts is not seen to have provided solutions to pictorial or aesthetic problems, because he is routinely equated with a programmatic and ritualistic vision of art. The 'theological' character of much of Watts's work must, of course, be recognized, and his capacity for moralizing holiness accounts for our unease in considering some of the better-known allegorical paintings. Watts appears pathetic within a Bloomsburian definition of culture for he is assumed to have conflated two 'failed' forms of national identity: the parasitic world of aristocratic and academic culture and the bourgeois realm of abstinence, discipline and efficiency. The traditional identification of Watts with classicism fails to deal with the density of a style that wanted to reconcile the classical body with the forces of evolutionary biology or modern psychology.
