The painting was accepted by Special Act of Congress, but in the president’s absence, not allowed entrance to the White House on the grounds of it being obscene. An interesting example is a version of Love and Life, described by The Magazine of Art as ‘without question one of the most beautiful canvases he has ever executed’, which Watts sent to the Chicago exhibition of 1893, and then presented as a gift to the American nation as his contribution to a permanent gallery. Watts was most philanthropic, and gave away many of his paintings. Watts did a very little illustrative work, including making three drawings for Dalziel’s Bible Gallery, and around 1840, and then later, making some drawings of cricket, remarkably unexpected in style, which were reproduced as illustrations in the English Illustrated Magazine in the 1890s. He was also a sculptor, something that is reflected in the modelling of some of his paintings. Among his many important later paintings are Hope, Time, Death and Judgement and The Minotaur. Watts’s first noticed work was Caratacus Led in Triumph through the Streets of Rome, which won a prize of 300 guineas and was exhibited in Westminster Hall in 1842. This comes out strongly in pictures such as The Infancy of Jupiter (1896). He has been called ‘the Victorian Michaelangelo’. However, he was part of no School or group, and went his own way, producing mainly allegorical pictures of great strength and mystery. He was also a close friend and ally of Leighton. Watts in fact knew most of the Pre-Raphaelites, and was an important influence on the younger ones. George Frederick Watts RA (1817-1904) was a very important Victorian artist, whose work appeals in a similar way to that of the Classicists such as Leighton and Albert Moore, or that of some of the Pre-Raphaelites. ‘To the discenment of truth and beauty, to the arousing of man’s imagination, to the widening of the span of this celestial region, should Art be mainly dedicated, for this most truly is its mission.’ – G.
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