The History of Modern Painting, Volume 3 (of 4): Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX centuryMuther, Richard
History
The History of Modern Painting, Volume 3 (of 4): Revised edition continued by the author to the end of the XIX century
Muther, Richard
Painting -- History
Saturday and Sunday afternoons as freely as if it were a museum.
[Illustration: _Pageant._
WATTS. ARIADNE.
(_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)]
[Illustration: _L'Art._
WATTS. ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE.
(_By permission of the Artist._)]
As a landscape painter Watts is a visionary like Turner, though in
addition to the purely artistic effect of his pictures he always
endeavoured to awaken remoter feelings and ideas of some kind or
another. His landscape "Corsica" reveals a grey expanse, with very
slight vibrations of tone which suggest that out to sea a distant island
is emerging from the mist. His "Mount Ararat," a picture entirely filled
with the play of light blue tones, represents a number of barren rocky
cones bathed in the intense blue of a pure transparent starry night.
Above the highest peak there is one star sparkling more brilliantly than
the others. In his "Deluge: the Forty-first Day," he attempted to
depict, after an interpretation of his own, the power "with which light
and heat, dissipating the darkness and dissolving the multitude of the
waters into mist and vapour, give new life to perished nature." What is
actually placed before the eye is a delicate symphony of colours which
would have delighted Turner: wild, agitated sea, clouds gleaming like
liquid gold, and mist behind which the sun rises in a magical glow, like
a red ball of fire.
In his portraits he is earnest and sincere. Just as fifty years ago
David d'Angers devoted half a lifetime to getting together a portrait
gallery of famous contemporaries, so to Watts belongs the glory of
having really been the historian of his time. The collection of
portraits, many of which are to be seen in the National Portrait
Gallery, comprises about forty likenesses, all of them half-length
pictures, all of them upon the same scale of size, all of them
representing very famous men. Amongst the poets comprised in this
gallery of genius are Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold,
Swinburne, William Morris, and Sir Henry Taylor; amongst prose-writers,
Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Lecky, Motley, and Leslie Stephen; amongst
statesmen, Gladstone, Sir Charles Dilke, the Duke of Argyll, Lord
Salisbury, Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Lyndhurst, and Lord Sherbrooke;
amongst the leaders of the clergy, Dean Stanley, Dean Milman, Cardinal
Manning, and Dr. Martineau; amongst painters, Rossetti, Millais,
Leighton, Burne-Jones, and Calderon; and amongst notable foreigners,
Guizot, Thiers, Joachim the violinist, and many others. In the matter of
technique Watts is excelled by many of the French. His portraits have
something heavy, nor are they eminent either for softness of modelling,
or for that momentary and animated effect peculiar to Lenbach. But few
portraits belonging to the nineteenth century have the same force of
expression, the same straightforward sureness of aim, the same grandeur
and simplicity. Before each of the persons represented one is able to
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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