(click image to enlarge)
A label on the original backboard read, ‘I bequeath this dear portrait of Signor to the artist and donor Mrs Alfred Southerby. Lennox Lodge, 54 Lennox Gardens’. G F Watts was known as ‘Signor’ to his closest friends.
George Frederic Watts OM, RA (1817-1904) was one of the most successful British artists of the 19th century. The drawing is based on a photograph reproduced in, Mary Seton Watts, George Frederick Watts: the annals of an artist’s life, (1912, facing page 314). The photograph was titled, ’G F Watts at Limnerslease November 1903, an instantaneous photograph’, and it was taken by Sir Emery Walker, an engraver, photographer and printer and part of the William Morris and Arts and Crafts movement.
In these last two years of his life, at the age of 87, Watts was spending more time in his home Limnerslease, Compton, Surrey and less in London, in an attempt to complete the larger than life sculpture of Lord Tennyson and his dog, Karenina for the City of Lincoln. The chalk drawing taken from this photograph shows a quiet, domestic moment. The two cups infer that Watts had company, either his loyal wife and indefatigable biographer, Mary, or his friend and photographer Sir Emery Walker.
There is some uncertainty as to the artist. The previous attribution, Mrs Alfred Southerby, a friend and amateur artist, appears increasingly unlikely. The artist could be his wife, Mary Watts, who was a talented and sensitive artist in her own right or even by George Frederic Watts himself, in the last months of his life. More research is needed.
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