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Modernism required art to be about itself, not reaching out to effect an immediate impact upon society, and it also rather preferred the middling sorts to keep their noses out of the arts. Connoisseurs and proletarians were fine, but Philistine England was not welcome. That I think is the key to understanding the precipitous fall from grace of Watts’ reputation. There were simply too many Middle Brows among Watts’ many fans, who perhaps saw in him reassuring continuity with the culture of the past, and for whom he played a rather overblown role as a maestro of his art – the Richard Clayderman of the Victorian art world, perhaps.But that’s far from the whole story. To start with, there were some very serious art-critics, such as Roger Fry, who continued to insist, to a sceptical 20th-century readership, that Watts was a profound artist. His paintings could be seen in high-profile places such as the Palace of Westminster, St Paul’s Cathedral and the White House in Washington. And Watts’ art itself continued its extraordinary life beyond the now largely uninterested art scene. To take one dramatic example – Hope became attached, somehow, to the African-American civil rights movement. Martin Luther King preached a sermon on the picture, and years later another similar sermon helped turn Barack Obama from law to politics. Meanwhile, in the Surrey Hills not far from Guildford, Mary Watts had gradually developed the home she had shared with Watts into an entire estate devoted to the principles of bringing art and craft into the lives of everyone – aesthete, stockbroker or cowherd. Together they had designed a house, Limnerslease, completed in 1891. Mary then built the extraordinary Watts Chapel with local villagers and established the Compton Potters’ 23IMAGES: HOPE (PRIVATE COLLECTION); 1 © NATIONAL TRUST IMAGES/JOHN HAMMOND; 2 WATTS GALLERY – ARTISTS VILLAGE; 3 ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO1 GF Watts, Jane ‘Jeanie’ Elizabeth Hughes, Mrs Nassau Senior, 1857–58. She was Britain’s first female civil servant 2 Watts Gallery, with Physical Energy shown in the foreground3 GF Watts, The Sower of the Systems, 1902“ HE SET HIMSELF THE MOST DEMANDING OF TASKS – TO CARVE OUT A TRULY MEANINGFUL ROLE FOR HIGH ART” NICOLAS TROMANS, CURATOR,WATTS GALLERY – ARTISTS’ VILLAGE GF WATTS45The Arts Society ReviewAutumn 2017