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The Watchers – William Blake Richmond (1876).

Sir William Blake Richmond (29 November 1842 – 11 February 1921) was an English portrait painter, sculptor and a designer of stained glass and mosaic. He is best known for his portrait work and decorative mosaics in St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Probably Richmond's most symbolically numinous painting is a small oil entitled The Watchers, or Angels Watching over a Dead Painter, started in 1873 and finished 1876. It depicts three completely naked angels, beautiful youths with large red wings, two seated on the floor and one leaning through a loggia window with the last light of evening over an Italianate landscape behind him. Behind the seated angels are frescoes of the Resurrection and the Descent from the Cross; beneath the window, on a bier, lies a corpse in a shroud, the artist, brilliantly lit in the evening light. This finely balanced if esoteric composition powerfully juxtaposes death with an eternal after-life, suggested in the twilight sky, and the very real corporeality of the naked bronzed youths in the foreground.

(Simon Reynolds, William Blake Richmond, An Artist's Life, p. 111).

The Watchers was one of three works which Richmond included in the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878, catalogued as Angel Watchers; this was the first Continental Exhibition in which Richmond participated.

Simon Reynolds notes: 'I am convinced that The Watchers depicts the corpse of Charlotte, dead some ten years, with a very Italian background surrounding her; the naked angels are more than likely depictions of Gaetano Meo, welcomed as he was into the intimacy of Richmond's life'.

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