G.F. Watts: Friendship with Frederic Leighton

"Portrait of Frederic Leighton" by G.F. Watts

"G.F. Watts was in Surrey when artist and president of the Royal Academy, Frederic Leighton died. Watts wrote the same day: 'This is dreadful!... No one will ever know such another. Alas! alas! alas!' Further on in the letter he said that the loss to the world was so great, that he almost felt ashamed to let his personal grief have so large a place, but he had enjoyed an uninterrupted and affectionate friendship of five-and-forty years with Leighton, and this was a great sadness for him. He ended by writing that, for the moment, he felt as if he could never go up the Academy steps again.

Watts was one of the first artists to settle in the Holland Park area, moving into Little Holland House with Sara and Thoby Prinsep in the 1850s. His stay was only meant to be temporary, but he ended up living with the family for around 20 years, establishing a studio in the house. It was here that Watts and Leighton probably first met, and it was Watts’s proximity at Little Holland House that encouraged Leighton to purchase the lease on the plot of land on Holland Park Road in 1864 to build his own house and studio. 

As neighbours, the two would often call on each other using a gate that connected their gardens. Mary Watts, the artist's second wife, wrote: 'Scarcely a day passed without a meeting between the two brothers-in-art; and young people coming home from their balls in London would often come across Leighton running in, soon after dawn, to have a few words with Signor [Watts] before the day's work began.' At Leighton House, Watts’ portrait of Leighton was displayed prominently on the staircase of his home for the rest of his life and can still be found in the same location today. His landscape "Haystacks" hung in Leighton's drawing room, along with works by Corot and Constable.

And every picture Leighton painted was a subject of the greatest interest to Watts. When referring to them he would say, that Leighton's paintings and statues were 'achievements,' his own were only 'suggestions.' Watts maintained that Leighton's drawings and sketches in chalk and pencil were as fine or finer than anything of the kind that had ever been done in the past or in the present. 

Watts' admired the man's character as well. He described Leighton as having 'A magnificent intellectual capacity, an unerring and instantaneous spring upon the point to unravel, a generosity, a sympathy, a tact (perhaps one of the most valuable qualities in our modern times), a lovable and sweet reasonableness, yet no weakness. . . . For my own part, I tell you life can never be the same to me again.'

They both believed that an artist's character was essential to the quality of his work. Leighton reflected on this in a lecture in 1881 by concluding: 'Believe me, whatever of dignity, whatever of strength we have within us, will dignify and will make strong the labour of our hands; whatever littleness degrades our spirit, will lessen them and drag them down. Whatever noble fire is in our hearts will burn also in our work. Whatever purity is ours will chasten and exalt it, for as we are, so our work is, and what we sow in our lives, that, beyond a doubt, we shall reap for good or for ill in the strengthening or defacing of whatever gifts have fallen to our lot.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "G.F. Watts: Reminiscences," 1906, by Mrs. Russell Barrington and from "Friends in Art: G.F. Watts and Leighton" from the Watts Gallery Artists Village blogpost. .)