Cathy's Art Diary

Useful small exhibition at Tate Britain looking at G.F.Watts’s ideas for a series of murals called “The House of Life”. Watt’s planned this series to show the evolution of humanity but it was never realised however he did work through many of the ideas in easel paintings. I hadn’t realised he donated 18 of these to the new Tate gallery in 1897 and when it opened two of the eight rooms were contemplative spaces dedicated to him. He also showed his work in the East End and made cheap prints available. This display had just six of the works on show, two long horizontal works, “Chaos” and “Sic Transit” and four larger works including the well known “Hope”. I’d not seen most of these works before. They now feel a bit overblown but I was interested to see some resemblance in “Mammon” shown here to Bacon’s screaming popes in the way a large, imposing figure looms out of the dark but maybe that was just the mood I was in. Closes 25 September 2022

Dramatic display in the Royal Academy courtyard of G.F. Watt’s statue, Physical Energy, to mark the bicentenary of the artists’ birth. I know the statue well as the original plaster version is at the Watt’s Gallery and there is a bronze version in Kensington Gardens. The statue shows a man on a horse which is rearing up as he seems to shade his eyes from the sun. It works well against the lovely architecture of Burlington House. The first bronze cast of the statue was Watt’s last submission to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1904 and this fourth version has been cast to be placed on the A3 near the Watt’s Gallery at Guildford as a permanent memorial of the bicentenary. Closes on 30 March 2018

An interesting discussion at the National Portrait Gallery marking 200 years since the birth of G.F.Watts. The event focused on Watts “Hall of Fame”,   a series of portraits of the heroes of his age, 17 of which were given to the gallery when it was founded. All the pictures are the same size and have the same focus on the head against a dark background. They tend to be reformers and campaigners. The speakers broadcaster A N Wilson and Art Historian Richard Ormond talked us though a selection of the pictures looking at who the sitters were, why Watts had chosen them and telling some anecdotes about the sittings. They then talked about Watts legacy and how the Hall of Fame pictures continue to be popular at the gallery despite the dip in fashion for Victoriana and how he compares to some of his contemporaries.

Surprisingly large exhibition at the Guildhall Art Gallery of the work of G. F. Watts made possible by the closure of the Watts Gallery for a restoration and development project. The exhibition is set out chronologically and takes you through Watts’s life and work in a very logical fashion. The detail on his life was done well covering the relationship with Little Holland House and the Pattle family. This link interests me for its Bloomsbury links. On the whole the work is a little chocolate boxy but it provides a link between the Pre-Raphaelites and the more conventional Victorian world. I had partly gone because I bought a G.F. Watts drawing about a year ago and I wanted to see if I could find a link with a finished work. My picture is sketches from his honeymoon in Egypt and I did see a glimpse of it in “For he had great possessions” a biblical study so I was delighted. Reviews Times Daily Telegraph