ABSTRACT
G. F. Watts's donation of eighteen symbolical paintings to the newly founded Tate Gallery in 1897 was widely perceived to be an altruistic gesture that consolidated the painter's reputation as the foremost artist of his generation, one who straddled the watershed separating the achievements of the nineteenth century from an uncertain future. The allegiances Watts had developed during the 1880s and 1890s continued to serve his cause after the National Gallery of British Art opened to the public on 21 July 1897. One should not, however, cast Watts as a precursor of modernism, for in his traditionalism and commitment to humanist spirituality he was resistant to the modernist aesthetic. From the 1970s Watts was only tokenistically represented within the Victorian and Edwardian collections in Galleries 14 and 16. The death of Mrs Watts in 1938 effectively signalled the dismantling of the bequest.
