Oil painting, 'The Window Seat', George Frederick Watts, 1861

Oil painting

Bequeathed by Constantine Alexander Ionides

George Frederick Watts was born on 23 September, 1817. He received no regular schooling on account of poor health, but later studied under the sculptor William Behnes and entered the R.A schools in 1835. In 1837 he achieved recognition for The Wounded Heron (Compton Watts Gallery), exhibited at the R.A. Watts won a prize of £300 for his painting Caractacus in the 1843 Westminster Hall competition. He went to Florence until 1847, where he worked under the patronage of Lady Holland. On his return to England, Watts won a further prize of £500 in the Westminster Hall competition for his Alfred inciting the Saxons to prevent the landing of the Danes. Inspired by Michelangelo and with his reputation now firmly established, Watts was determined to devote himself to grand, universal themes such as Faith; Hope; Charity; Love and Life; and Love and Death. However he rose to front rank as a portrait painter and painted many of his eminent contemporaries including Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, William Gladstone and John Everett Millais. He was elected to the A.R.A and R.A in 1867. In 1864 he married 16-year-old Ellen Terry and painted a charming allegorical portrait of her, Choosing, but the couple separated the following year. A major late sculpture, Physical Energy (1904, London, Kensington Gardens) is surprisingly modernistic. Watts presented many of his works to art galleries and institutions. He died on 1 July, 1904.

This intimate study of a woman sewing recalls 17th-century Dutch paintings. According to Veronica Gould in her book G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian the woman depicted is the Prinseps’ French maid.(1) Watts met the Prinseps in the late 1840s when he was living and working near Berkeley Square in Mayfair. Sara Prinsep and her husband, Thoby, a retired East India Company official lived nearby. Watts managed to help his new friends by persuading Lord and Lady Holland, benefactors of his with whom he had spent four years in Italy, to grant the Prinseps a twenty-one year lease on their dower house, Little Holland House. The lease began on the 25th December 1950 and shortly after this Watts joined the Prinseps’ household as their resident artistic luminary. This arrangement evidently suited both parties and was not to be of short duration; Sara Prinsep famously remarked of this circumstance, ‘he came to stay three days; he stayed thirty years.’(2) Surrounded by family life, Watts found the Prinsep household a comfortable environment to live and work in. The Window Seat evokes just such a relaxed atmosphere. The warm hues and soft texturing of the paint together with the introverted nature of the maid are elements that create such a mood.

The Window Seat was bought from Watts by Charles Rickards who was an important early patron of the artist. First exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861, it also appeared in an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery twenty years later in 1881, when on loan from Rickards. In 1887, after the death of Rickards, it was acquired by Constantine Alexander Ionides at a Christie’s sale on the 2nd April. A number of publications dating from the first decade of the twentieth century often included this painting in lists of Watts’ most important works.(3)

Citations
1. G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian, (New Haven; London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2004), p.59
2. Watts, M. S., George Frederick Watts (vol I), (London: Macmillan & Co, 1912), p.128
3. For example, see Graham, George L., ‘George Frederick Watts, England's Painter of Eternal Truths’ in Brush and Pencil, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Jul., 1904), pp.273-4

This intimate study of a woman sewing recalls 17th-century Dutch paintings. It belonged to Charles Rickards, an important early patron of Watts.

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