GF Watts by GK Chesterton

GK meets GF sounds like the title of one of those mid-20th century albums when a producer with an eye for money teamed up an old crooner with an instrumentalist of the same age to interpret new standards. In this case, it is a book from the beginning of the 20th century, when the writer GK Chesterton, with an artistic training inspired by Christianity, put his pen on paper to analyze the work of GF Watts, the renowned Victorian painter. Chesterton’s style has been described as dealing with popular sayings, proverbs, and allegories, and then flipping them around. Basically, he follows this model by presenting George Frederick Watts’s reputation in this biography.

Watts was a great of English painting during the Victorian era. Chesterton begins by claiming Welsh roots for the painter, along with Celtic sentiments, but the theory is vague and frankly contradicts the final location of the Watts museum, near Guilford in the all-English home counties.

In many ways, it is easier to describe Watts starting with what he was not. He was not a Pre-Raphaelite, but he probably sympathized with many of the group’s artistic goals. He was not an impressionist, always preferring the classical, centralized and constantly lit subject. He was not a modernist in any sense, but many of his images have a curiously modern twist. Perhaps he is closer to being an English Symbolist, but that is not what Chesterton thinks.

Watts was a romantic. He was an establishment figure who could also be said to be against the establishment. He received commissions from the state, often donated artwork for large projects, and painted the rich, famous, and significant. But he also rejected national honors and used the proceeds from his celebrity portraits to fund projects to represent the social conditions of his time. He was not a member of the Arts and Crafts movement, but his wife was, and he was clearly a sympathizer. Adjacent to the Watts museum is arguably the finest British example of Celtic Revival Arts and Crafts architecture, the Watts Chapel in Compton, which was essentially his wife’s project. We can go back to Chesterton’s opening at this point to record the fact that Watts, himself, did not claim that this was linked to his own heritage.

Watts’s work is highly individualistic within a framework that might at first appear conventional. Chesterton, in his characteristic obfuscation, defines three fundamental characteristics of this work. “… first, skeptical idealism, the belief that abstract truths were still the main concerns of men when theology abandoned them; second, didactic simplicity, the claim to teach other men and assume one’s own value and rectitude; third, cosmic utilitarianism, the consideration of anything like art or philosophy perpetually with reference to a general good. ” Apparently things like cosmic utilitarianism can be drawn directly from the visual image, although a modern reader of this biography might find this quite difficult.

Chesterton, as always, cannot resist moralizing on his own opinions. “Until now, the painful result would seem to be that while men in the early days said unscientific things with the vagueness of gossip and legend, now they say unscientific things with the simplicity and certainty of science.” Perhaps, as a writer, GK should have read this quote before writing the review just cited. The author, however, occasionally deals with the visual content. Watts had a penchant, perhaps a penchant for the human back. “The back is the most frightening and mysterious thing in the universe: it is impossible to talk about it. It is the part of man that he knows nothing about; like a peripheral province forgotten by an emperor”

Chesterton describes some of Watts’ memorable works. He concentrates on portraits and poetic and dream works, such as Hope. What is missing is a description of the social comment. But, after a hundred pages of embroidering the artist and his work with his own style of neatness, Chesterton concludes with “And this brings me to my last word. Every now and then Watts has failed. I fear that it may possibly be inferred from Him. magnificent language that I have frequently applied, and with full awareness of my act, to this great man, who I believe that all his work technically successful. Clearly it is not. Because I believe that many times he has hardly known what he was doing; I believe that he has been in the dark when the lines went wrong, he has been even more in the dark and things turned out well.As I have already pointed out, the vague lines that his mere physical instinct would cause him to draw, have in them the curves of the Cosmos. His automatic manual action was, I think, certainly a revelation to others, certainly a revelation to himself. Standing before a dark canvas on a quiet afternoon, he has drawn lines and something has happened. In such an hour he has fulfilled li terally the strange and splendid phrase of the Psalm. It has continued because of the word of meekness, truth, and justice. And his right hand has taught him terrible things. “Not very talented, GF apparently was lucky, at least according to GK. One hopes the meeting was cordial.”