G. F. Watts: Victorian Visionary is not a catalogue raisonné of the work of Watts, the artist whose work was simultaneously both deeply eccentric from and superbly characteristic of Victorian painting and sculpture. Omitting major works in the collection of the Tate Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery among others, it is far from a complete survey. Yet because the volume documents (with lush color illustrations) the extensive collection of key works, preparatory and preliminary investigations, as well as personal artefacts that the artist and his wife collected for their own gallery of his work, it comes closer to being one than any other publication. Compiled in a substantial volume whose dimensions seem to exceed even the usual generous proportions of Yale University Press books, some one hundred items from the collection of the Watts Gallery Compton are extensively explored in lengthy, well-illustrated catalogue entries and four essays. Including works drawn from his earliest to his latest productions in every medium, this book makes an excellent introduction to the varied, contradictory, and single-minded practice of George Frederic Watts.

Subtitled “Highlights from the Watts Gallery Collection,” this publication is linked to a major project to restore the museum created by Watts and his second wife Mary at their home in Compton, Surrey, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now at the end of a slightly awkward journey out of London by train and bus or taxi, the Watts Gallery, like the reputation of the artist it features, did not fare well in the twentieth century. Mark Bills’s essay, “Watts Gallery: A Temple of Art in Rural England,” traces the history of the space itself, beginning with its original commission by the Wattses from a young local architect through extension, renovation, and benign neglect. Bills highlights the distinctive nature of the gallery as a bespoke Victorian exhibition space, and he reflects on the impact of its rural location and unsympathetic modernizing refurbishments during the twentieth century. His essay relates how the Watts Gallery came to exist as a rather dusty and eccentric relic at the end of the twentieth century, and argues for a renewed commitment to the appreciation for the particular nature of the place, from its architecture and collection to Watts’s choice of wallpaper—Tynecastle’s “Venetian”—which is one of many archival materials illustrated in the essay, and used as the pattern for the endpapers of the book.

Readers are also given an expert account of Watts’s life and work by Barbara Bryant, author of the National Portrait Gallery exhibition catalogue G. F. Watts Portraits: Fame and Beauty in Victorian Society (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2004) as well as other scholarly works about the artist. Bryant focuses on the periods and events in Watts’s life that had the most significant impact on the visual character of his practice, including his early art education; travel to Italy and France; patronage, commissions, and exhibiting opportunities; and his ambitions to work artistically with the immaterial and spiritual aspects of life and the world around him. Unlike Veronica Gould’s recent biography of Watts, G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), which is lengthy, detailed, and peppered with monochrome illustrations, Bryant’s essay is less a biography of a man than an account of a body of work, perceptive about technical and other developments in his practice over a long career. An improved version of a similar essay Bryant wrote for the National Portrait Gallery catalogue, it is very useful here because the life-story structure of the essay corresponds with the chronological organization of the catalogue itself. The essay is also generously illustrated with works which are not in the catalogue, including major works from other collections, rarely-seen preparatory work, and reproductions of works now inaccessible.

What these two essays reveal is Watts’s distinctive situation in Victorian society, in which he was simultaneously unique, even eccentric, and an accepted insider. This unusual status is further explored in Michael Wheeler’s essay, “The Possibility of Watts: Religion and Spirituality in Victorian England,” which probes that most perplexing aspect of Watts’s work, its spiritual dimensions. Wheeler is a theology and literature specialist with a special interest in aesthetics. His essay sketches the scene of Victorian religion, paying particular attention to the disputes and crises that tormented the Church of England during the nineteenth century. Watts, like many others at this time, eschewed formal religion in favor of a spirituality of mixed traditions, which Wheeler compares with today’s New Ageism. Unlike the related discussion in Andrew Wilton’s and Robert Upstone’s catalogue, The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts: Symbolism in Britain, 1860–1910 (London: Tate Publishing, 1997), this one is grounded in the theological debates and concerns of Watts’s immediate circle rather than those of the distant and somewhat outré continental symbolist scene. Wheeler’s readings of Watts’s paintings Spirit of Christianity (1872–75) and Time Death and Judgement (1870s–1896) as treatments that celebrate Christian values while evading doctrinal particulars are convincing, but should be read alongside some of the essays in Representations of G.F. Watts, edited by Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004). Those grapple with the complexities of Watts’s visual address to matters of the spirit through detailed examinations of his technique and his classical references as well as his Christian ones.

The final essay, Stephanie Brown’s discussion of Watts’s sculpture, makes an especially revealing study of the tension between abstraction and naturalism in Watts’s practice. One of the difficulties of understanding and interpreting Watts is in coming to grips with his seemingly eclectic use of different stylistic devices. Brown meets this head on through a detailed analysis of the little-known but substantial equestrian sculpture Monument to Hugh Lupus (1884). Studying the lengthy correspondence around the commission and reflecting on Watts’s characteristically grand (if not grandiose) ambitions for this work, Brown’s essay reveals the tension in Watts’s practice between his conception of a work and the difficulty he had in realizing that idea in physical form. She is particularly sharp at spotting the technical irregularities in his practice, and suggesting how these affected his output. Her essay ends with an appeal to reread the monumental final work, Physical Energy (1904), not as an emblem of Victorian imperialism but as an attempt to explore the sculptural process in a distinctively modern way. This is a particularly useful essay, and its insights could, I suspect, be applied to his painting practice by an interpreter who was equally attentive to the processes and materials involved.

The four essays offer informed guidance to the distinctive and wide-ranging nature of Watts’s practice as painter, would-be muralist, monument-maker, and sculptor. They make good preparation for the enjoyment of the catalogue proper, which is ordered according to the major chronological periods of work identified by Bryant. The entries include a complete provenance, comprehensive histories of up to a few thousand words, and excellent quality reproductions of each work. Most entries also have one or more supplementary illustrations, which means that some major works in other collections appear in the catalogue entry for a preparatory piece—so while it is not a complete catalogue raisonné, a careful reader will find information about many major works that are not formally catalogued here. The final few entries detail items from archives of the Compton collection, including Watts’s honors, medals, and palette, which will be of interest to the true enthusiast, and indicate the extent of the Compton holdings. The catalogue presents a Watts oeuvre that is more painterly than I anticipated, and, generally, prettier and more conventional than that invoked in references to Symbolism or his grand but peculiar efforts to work “for the nation.” The Watts that appears in the essays is also the one in the catalogue—an eccentric, but one whose life and work lay definitively within the fold of a dominant culture.

The catalogue succeeds in demonstrating that the Compton collection is worthy of being funded to “national” standards of presentation and conservation, a major premise of the refurbishment currently in process. The single-artist focus provided by the collection and the biographical structure of the catalogue succeed in giving coherence to a body of work that has often been treated in fragments. Over his seventy-year career Watts practiced across a range of characteristic Victorian “styles” and in different media, and his work was consequently treated in rather piecemeal fashion—it is either the early or late work, or the portraiture or major painting, that attracts attention. This pattern bears comparison with another prominent Victorian, J. E. Millais, who has also recently benefitted from monographic treatment in a major exhibition at the Tate and in some outstanding publications. With both Millais and Watts, it has been very rewarding to revisit the life’s work and reflect on some of the overarching themes and ambitions of these two great and prolific artists. I hope that with this renewed and reinvigorated sense of their oeuvre, writers will again turn to reflecting on their work in the broader context of nineteenth-century culture.