ABSTRACT
George Frederic Watts's life, in this account, was lived at the margins of conventional human aspiration. His failure to complete, or even to fully define, his great project is the proof of its very value. Though Watts's artistic 'greatness' was not defined until late in the nineteenth century, his career began in the 1840s with a major public project. Resolving the tension between literature and sensuous visual effect was a complex problem, if Watts was to avoid the accusation of 'fleshliness' with which Rossetti had been charged, or of the 'mustiness' condemned by Browning. Watts's work can be understood as an heroic attempt to link social and aesthetic values in a reconfigured public art, or he can be made to embody the moralizing bombast of an obsolete tradition. Watts's endless reworking of his paintings left many of them with scratched, scraped and blotched surfaces, half-effaced forms.
