The Life & Works | George Frederic Watts (1817—1904) | A Poet in Paint

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A craftsman of musical instruments, the name `George Frederic’ was chosen by the father in respect to Handel, the composer’s day of birth being 23rd of February; the same day as the new baby’s birth. Born in 1817 as the eldest son of a second marriage, the deaths of two younger brothers in 1823, and then the severe blow of his mother’s death in 1826 when he was only nine, meant that death dominated George Frederic’s early life and was to be an obsession for him ever after.
George Frederic drew from an early age reflecting a natural skill as a draftsman. Born and raised in London, Watts lived with his father and half-sisters at various addresses in the city. As the family’s fortunes declined around 1826, they moved to Star Street, Paddington, then on the outskirts of London. Through professional connections with another family of piano makers, George Watts senior arranged for his son to enter the studio of sculptor William Behnes in Soho. In 1827, aged ten, George Frederic began informal attendance at the busy sculpture studio on Dean Street. With commissions for public monuments and portrait busts, the popular London character Behnes enjoyed success at this stage in his career. George Frederic learned by drawing from plaster casts but most notably he encountered the world of antiques for the first time. As a sculptor, Behnes carved and worked with marble, facilitating George Frederic with access to plaster casts of the Elgin marbles which he soon discovered was only a short walk away at the British Museum. Newly installed from 1832, the Elgin marbles became the cradle of Watts’s entire artistic career. “The Elgin Marbles were my teachers. It was from them alone that I learned.” George Frederic admired Behnes’s other talent as a portrait draftsman and the youth began producing small portrait drawings in colored chalks and pencil as a way to earn a living. The master sculptor’s younger brother introduced Watts to wider literary horizons and arranged George Frederic’s tutelage in oil painting. From past masters of portraiture available at the National Gallery, Watts’ oil copies—smoked to appear old—started Watts towards more formal training as a painter.
By the age of sixteen George Frederic had his own studio on Upper Norton Street near Fitzroy Square and supported himself as a portrait draftsman, but his high aspirations sought out the highest exemplars of the past. He drew an approximate rendition of Paul Preaching at Athens as a way to learn how to organize a large multi-figure composition. Watts’s techniques developed sufficiently for him to enter the Royal Academy Schools at Somerset House in Spring 1835 at the age of eighteen. However, the routine of copying when he already had developed this skill on his own was stifling. His oils had also advanced to a degree of fluency, not only in technique but also as a study of character.
Inspired by the great artists of the recent past such as Joshua Reynolds, and living history painters such as William Hilton, George Frederic matured as an artist during the 1830s. The ideal of history painting was still very much alive and he inherited a belief in “high art”, as epitomized in the work of the old masters.

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