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Who was the most famous living British painter around 1900? The answer is probably George Frederic Watts (1817–1904), the bicentenary of whose birth falls this year. Watts managed to impress the intelligentsia of his day, as well as succeeding in reaching, with his allegories of human progress, the non-gallery-going public – that demographic element which those who run museums today spend so much time worrying about. When we speak of ‘his day’, however, that needs a little more precision. As a young man, Watts exhibited alongside Turner in London; towards the end of his life he was an influence upon the young Picasso. The artist’s career, given that he was already hard at work as a teenager, spanned some seven decades. But Watts’ name only became a household word from the 1880s onwards. In that decade there were a series of high-profile exhibitions –in Manchester, London and New York (the latter attracted over one million visitors) – which confirmed Watts in his position as a National Treasure. Watts, it seemed to the late Victorians, was an artist who had set himself the most demanding of tasks – to carve out a truly meaningful role for high art in the modern world. Watts began by aspiring to emulate Michelangelo and the great artists of the Renaissance in undertaking vast murals and frescoes. Later he had turned inwards under the influence of the Aesthetic Movement of the 1860s. Turning his back too upon the market, upon fashion, upon Impressionism, Watts was authenticity personified. Nothing mattered except the lifelong search for the resonant image – the picture that would express the epic struggle of humanity to raise itself up from superstition, selfishness and ignorance. Placed against the self-satisfied and prettified products of most of the London art scene of this period, Watts really did seem to belong to another time and place, to be a great Old Master somehow transplanted to the smogs and entertainments of modern London.As Watts evolved from outsider artist to saint of the art world at the end of the 19th century, his subject matter narrowed down to the key interests which had obsessed him since the 1840s. These were prophetic pictures warning of the sins to which people were still heirs in industrial and semi-democratic Britain. Mammon, for example (which some unkind spirits have suggested bears a resemblance to the current American president), is a personification of financial greed and the appalling damage to human life in which it results. The image, like so many of Watts’ major later statements, had a real impact beyond the galleries of the metropolis: it was adopted as a kind of coat of arms by William Morris’s Hammersmith Socialist Society. Watts also continued, as he had always done, to paint portraits both of his friends and famous contemporaries (the two categories often overlapped), and devoted years to creating an extended sequence of male portraits for the National Portrait Gallery. Perhaps most originally, from an art-historical point of view, was Watts’ cosmic imagery, in which he sought to express a sense of the human spirit’s striving for betterment as an aspect of the unfolding of the universe. In this category fall works such as the familiar Hope, with its allegory of human blindness and resilience; and Physical Energy, the epic sculptural group of a horse and rider, which, with its craggy, lunar surface, was intended to represent mankind as itself a cosmic body.By the time of his death in 1904, it is probably fair to say that Watts suffered from being too well supported. The National Portrait Gallery, the new Tate Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum showed his work, and there were shelves of journalism vaunting his greatness. There was also his widow, the artist’s second wife Mary Watts, a distinguished designer in her own right, who maintained the role of keeper of the flame into the 1930s by which time, of course, anything Victorian had been decisively mothballed. The ambitious wall paintings created by Watts in the 1850s were now hard to get sight of, and the very basis of Watts’ approach to making art had been undermined. 144GF WATTSThe Arts Society ReviewAutumn 2017