The actual artistic education of Watts, though thorough indeed in its way, had a somewhat peculiar character, the air of something detached and private, and to the external eye something even at random. He works hard, but in an elusive and personal manner. He does not remember the time when he did not draw: he was an artist in his babyhood as he is an artist still in his old age. Like Ruskin and many other of the great and serious men of the century, he would seem to have been brought up chiefly on what may be called the large legendary literature, on such as Homer and Scott. Among his earliest recorded works was a set of coloured illustrations to the Waverley Novels, and a sketch of the struggle for the body of Patroclus. He went to the Academy schools, but only stayed there about a month; never caring for or absorbing the teaching, such as it was, of the place. He wandered perpetually in the Greek galleries of the British Museum, staring at the Elgin marbles, from which he always declared he learnt all the art he knew. “There,” he said, stretching out his hand towards the Ilyssus in his studio, “there is my master.” We hear of a friendship between him and the sculptor William Behnes, of Watts lounging about that artist’s studio, playing with clay, modelling busts, and staring [Illustration: CHAOS.] at the work of sculpture. His eyes seemed to have been at this time the largest and hungriest part of him. Even when the great chance and first triumph of his life arrived a year or two later, even when he gained the great scholarship which sent him abroad to work amid the marbles of Italy, when a famous ambassador was his patron and a brilliant circle his encouragement, we do not find anything of the conventional student about him. He never painted in the galleries; he only dreamed in them. This must not, of course, be held to mean that he did not work; though one or two people who have written memoirs of Watts have used a phraseology, probably without noticing it, which might be held to imply this. Not only is the thing ludicrously incongruous with his exact character and morals; but anyone who knows anything whatever about the nature of pictorial art will know quite well that a man could not paint like that without having worked; just as he would know that a man could not be the Living Serpent without any previous practice with his joints. To say that he could really learn to paint and draw with the technical merit of Watts, or with any technical merit at all, by simply looking at other people’s pictures and statues will seem to anyone, with a small technical sense, like saying that a man learnt to be a sublime violinist by staring at fiddles in a shop window. It is as near a physical impossibility as can exist in these matters. Work Watts must have done and did do; it is the only conclusion possible which is consistent either with the nature of Watts or the nature of painting; and it is fully supported by the facts.