I

A BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE


In July of 1904 the eighty-seven mortal years of George Frederick Watts
came to an end. He had outlived all the contemporaries and acquaintances
of his youth; few, even among the now living, knew him in his middle
age; while to those of the present generation, who knew little of the
man though much of his work, he appeared as members of the Ionides
family, thus inaugurating the series of private and public portraits for
which he became so famous. The Watts of our day, however, the teacher
first and the painter afterwards, had not yet come on the scene. His
first aspiration towards monumental painting began in the year 1843,
when in a competition for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament he
gained a prize of £300 for his cartoon of "Caractacus led Captive
through the Streets of Rome." At this time, when history was claiming
pictorial art as her servant and expositor, young Watts carried off the
prize against the whole of his competitors. This company included the
well-known historical painter Haydon, who, from a sense of the
impossibility of battling against his financial difficulties, and from
the neglect, real or fancied, of the leading politicians, destroyed
himself by his own hand.

The £300 took the successful competitor to Italy, where for four years
he remained as a guest of Lord Holland. Glimpses of the Italy he gazed