To be the last of the great is no guarantee that your greatness will last. The grandest of the English pompiers, Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830–1896), died the day after inheriting his peerage. The reputation of Leighton’s friend and longtime neighbor George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) has lasted better than most. This is not just because Watts spread his bets among Titianesque psychological portraits, discreetly radical social comment, and flagrant mysticism on the grand scale, not forgetting murky landscapes and a bit of monumental sculpture on the side. It is because Watts, like his age, built to last.
No other high Victorian painter worked so hard at his posterity.
No other high Victorian painter worked so hard at his posterity. In his last years, Watts, abetted by his wife Mary, designed and curated a museum to himself in the village of Compton, Surrey. Compton’s setting, its gentle hills and soft light, recur in the childhood memories of characters in the novels of Aldous Huxley, who grew up nearby and is buried in its ramshackle churchyard. At Compton, George Watts ruled a little island of ideal community, like Pala in Huxley’s Island(1962). Mary Watts marshaled the locals in art projects, a Lady Bountiful with a pot of glaze, as in an early Huxley novel. Still, by 2004, a century after Watts’s departure for the great atelier in the sky, the rotating collection in the Watts Gallery included some temporary twentieth-century installations: plastic buckets, to catch the
