Watts was a grandee of English painting during the Victorian era. Chesterton starts by claiming Welsh roots for the painter, along with Celtic sentiments, but the theory is vague and frankly contradicted by the eventual location of the Watts museum, close to Guilford in the utterly English Home Counties.
In many ways, it is easier to describe Watts by starting with what he was not. He was not a Pre-Raphaelite, but probably sympathized with many of the group’s artistic aims. He was not an Impressionist, preferring always the classical, centrally placed, consistently-lit subject. He was not a modernist in any sense, but many of his images have a curiously modern feel. Perhaps he comes closest to being an English Symbolist, but that is not what Chesterton thinks.
Watts was a Romantic. He was an establishment figure who was also arguably anti-establishment. He took commissions from the state, often donated works to grand projects and painted the rich, famous and significant. But he also refused national honours and used the earnings from his celebrity portraits to fund projects to depict the social conditions of his age. He was not a member of the Arts and Crafts movement, but his wife was, and he was clearly a sympathizer. Next to the Watts museum is arguably Britain’s finest example of Arts and Crafts Celtic Revival architecture, the Watts Chapel at Compton, which essentially was his wife’s project. We may return to Chesterton´s opening at this point to record the fact that Watts, himself, did not claim this linked to his own heritage.
Watts’s work is highly individualistic within a
framework that might appear at first sight to be conventional. Chesterton, in
his characteristic obfuscation, defines three fundamental characteristics of
this work. “…first, the sceptical idealism, the belief that abstract verities
remained the chief affairs of men when theology left them; second, the didactic
simplicity, the claim to teach other men and to assume one’s
own value and rectitude; third, the cosmic utilitarianism, the consideration of
any such thing as art or philosophy perpetually with reference to a general
good." Apparently, such things as cosmic utilitarianism can be gleaned
directly from the visual image, though a modern reader of this biography might
find that rather difficult.
Chesterton, as ever, cannot resist moralizing about
his own opinions. “So far the result
would painfully appear to be that whereas men in the earlier times said
unscientific things with the vagueness of gossip and legend, they now say
unscientific things with the plainness and the certainty of science.” Perhaps,
as a writer, GK should have read this quote before writing the analysis just
quoted. The author, nevertheless, does occasionally deal with the visual
content. Watts did have a tendency, perhaps a proclivity for the human back. “The back is the most awful and mysterious thing in the
universe: it is impossible to speak about it. It is the part of man that he
knows nothing of; like an outlying province forgotten by an emperor”
Chesterton does describe some of Watts´s memorable
work. He concentrates on the portraiture and the poetic, dreamlike works, such
as Hope. What is missing is any description of the social comment. But, after a
hundred pages of embroidering the artist and his work with his own brand of
prolixity, Chesterton concludes with “And this
brings me to my last word. Now and again Watts has failed. I am afraid that it
may possibly be inferred from the magniloquent language which I have
frequently, and with a full consciousness of my act, applied to this great man,
that I think the whole of his work technically triumphant. Clearly it is not.
For I believe that often he has scarcely known what he was doing; I believe
that he has been in the dark when the lines came wrong; that he has been still
deeper in the dark and things came right. As I have already pointed out, the
vague lines which his mere physical instinct would make him draw, have in them
the curves of the Cosmos. His automatic manual action was, I think, certainly a
revelation to others, certainly a revelation to himself. Standing before a dark
canvas upon some quiet evening, he has made lines and something has happened.
In such an hour the strange and splendid phrase of the Psalm he has literally
fulfilled. He has gone on because of the word of meekness and truth and of
righteousness. And his right hand has taught him terrible things.” Not really
talented, GF, it seems, got lucky, at least according to GK. One hopes the
meeting was cordial.
