For an illustration of Mr. Watts' drawing we will take the picture of
"Love and Death", perhaps the most pictorially significant of all Mr.
Watts' designs. The enormous figure of Death advances impressively
with right arm raised to force the door which a terrified Love would
keep closed against him. The figure of Death is draped in grey, the
colour that Mr. Watts is most in sympathy with and manages best. But
the upper portion of the figure is vast, and the construction beneath
the robe too little understood for it not to lack interest; and in the
raised arm and hand laid against the door, where power and delicacy of
line were indispensable for the pictorial beauty of the picture, we
are vouchsafed no more than a rough statement of rudimentary fact.
Love is thrown back against the door, his right arm raised, his right
leg advanced in action of resistance to the intruder. The movement is
well conceived, and we regret that so summary a line should have been
thought sufficient expression. Any one who has ever held a pencil in a
school of art knows how a young body, from armpit to ankle-bone, flows
with lovely line. Any one who has been to the Louvre knows the passion
with which Ingres would follow this line, simplifying it and drawing
it closer until it surpassed all melody. But in Mr. Watts' picture the
boy's natural beauty is lost in a coarse and rough planing out that
tells of an eye that saw vaguely and that wearied, and in an execution
full of uncertain touch and painful effort. Unless the painter is
especially endowed with the instinct of anatomies, the sentiment of
proportion, and a passion for form, the nude is a will-o'-the-wisp,
whose way leads where he may not follow. No one suspects Mr. Watts of
one of these qualifications; he appears even to think them of but
slight value, and his quest of the allegorical seems to be merely
motived by an unfortunate desire to philosophise.