ABSTRACT
Sandys, who did more than one drawing for Swinburne during the few years of their friendship, should have been employed to illustrate Atalanta in Calydon and then the northern narrative poetry of William Morris. It is Watts who is the typical grand artist of the Victorian period; and, with his consciousness of being the heir of all the artistic ages, his choice of noble or at any rate distinguished subjects, his grave approach, he has nobility, sometimes only of intention, often purchased at a cost to sheer painting and draughtsmanship. Capable, as he proved often enough, of painting the sitter as he is and yet educing greatness, he will evade the challenge to a certainly not inadequate technique in a lofty refusal of what he has come to think a trivial particularity; and, as regards a woman's dress, determined that it shall not date, will generalize it into a meaningless cloak of nudity.
